this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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No, they really just don't want to learn. I promise people would rather be okay with their current situation (even if its shitty) as long as they don't have to learn. Because a lot of people decided that once they were done with high school/college, that there was no need to learn anymore. And now its hard for them to learn
If they do choose to learn, its because they want to. But if they don't want to learn, they simply wont. It really is simple.
I've just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous.
Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.
Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.
There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn't easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don't do that nearly as much, even though they could.
Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They've just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There's just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.
Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they're being deceived into thinking they're learning at all.