The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.
I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers are doing to keep students engaged and feeling motivated by what they do.
Not every one, and maybe not even majority, of our actions can be "engaging" and "motivated". When you finish the school and start working, don't expect that all work will be engaging or that someone exists in the company to motivate you. Probably nobody is engaged while doing grocery shopping or running errands. Deep work? It is _not_ fun, trust me, but often very rewarding _in the end_.
This just reeks of entitlement. “Entertain me and engage me! Let no moment of my life ever be touched by confusion or struggle! Spoon feed me everything I can ever want or need!”
Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot. So if you care to have any agency and control over your own life you better figure out how to learn what you need to know, whether it’s engaging or not.
As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.
The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
Don't worry about me. I work very hard, made it through difficult programs at top schools, made (and continue to make) significant contributions at leading companies and my compensation is probably top 0.01% in the world.
I'm familiar with hard work and struggle, having come from nothing. In fact the only thing that was handed to me was values around education and how important it is - I still believe in that deeply.
I still disagree with your framing.
Let's take this example:
> As for jobs, they’re hiring you to do work, not to be entertained. Don’t like it? Move along to something else then.
You don't see the problem here? Losing talent is not a winning strategy. If I'm a company leader, I take it as MY responsibility to create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work? There is none. Having employees that are working purely from a place of fear and not being able to pay bills is scraping the bottom of the barrel.
In short - I will bet against your version of leadership any day. I think it's anti-leadership and I would love to have you as a competitor company.
> The people who feed you an endless stream of engaging content that keeps you mindlessly consuming are not doing it with your best interests at heart.
I don't disagree with you here. We're in complete agreement. I just think this point gets over-emphasized and my original point doesn't get talked about enough - which is why I originally commented.
> Ultimately, it’s not the school’s problem if you don’t learn, it’s yours. You’re the one who’s going to have to go through life not understanding math and whatnot.
Also want to respond to this. I agree with you here as well. However I think there is a distinction between school and education. It is the environment of school that I'm talking about in particular and the way some subjects are taught (History is a pet peeve of mine. As an adult, I LOVE history and learning about history - I do it in my free time. In school, history education is fundamentally broken IMO).
> create a place where people want to work and work hard towards goals they see as meaningful. If people don't see personal growth and a path to bettering their life or others' through work - what is the purpose of sacrifice and hard work?
Working towards goals that are meaningful doesn't mean that you will be entertained and engaged with fun things to do all the time. Often quite the opposite. Personal growth and bettering your life also entails doing things that may not be very engaging.
If you focus on attracting people who want to be engaged and spoon fed and will refuse to do any work that they don't find immediately rewarding, sure, I'll be happy to compete with you.
I don't know where you got the words "entertained", "fun things to do all the time", or "spoon fed" from. I didn't use any of those words and I think we actually agree that meaningful things doesn't equate to parties all the time.
When I say engaged and meaningful - I mean it in the purest sense of the words, whereas you seem to equate it to "unserious".
Back to concrete questions: Are business leaders and educators presenting problems in a way that people connect with and see the value of? Are they providing an environment that makes people want to work hard and makes them feel empowered to take on difficult challenges?
Take History education for example. I'd say the answer to the above questions are "no".
* Most students who take a History class in a typical American school don't see how memorizing dates for tests connects to anything meaningful in their life or understanding of the world.
* I'd say educators don't or can't spend much time or effort connecting the dots or presenting information in a way that inspires people to ask deeper questions.
Instead, the focus is on rote memorization in preparation for flawed standardized state tests which themselves serve as the basis for obtaining federal funding to run the school itself.
Not to mention teachers themselves are underpaid and under-resourced while the students are forced to wake up at 6am (often not getting enough sleep) to catch the bus, sit in uncomfortable chairs for 8hrs a day with no agency, and then we're surprised that they're not excited by people talking at them all day?
Put another way, let's say you show up to a restaurant that serves shitty food, has a shitty environment, and the server get your order all wrong - you pay for this with your time and money. Do you think it's reasonable for the head chef to complain that customers are ungrateful and should be happy they got food at all? If the restaurant down the street takes the care to get all these things right, are customers entitled for choosing that restaurant every time instead?
Yes, it would be really nice if every teacher could be Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society or Joe Clark from Lean On Me but that just isn't the case and it isn't ever going to be the case.
Work is work and you can choose to engage yourself with it or not. Obviously, employers should not mistreat their employees, but ultimately they're all there to do whatever it is the business does and the point is to all succeed together as a business, not to nurture the personal growth of the employees.
If a server can't be bothered to make sure an order is correct the customer doesn't care whether the environment was sufficiently engaging or not, they only care about their order being right.
It's not that long ago that most people's "job" was growing enough food to survive. Nature didn't care if you found this fulfilling or engaging, you either did it or you starved. I can guarantee that if your life and your family's lives depended on growing enough potatoes to last through the winter, you'd be very interested and engaged in how to grow potatoes. It is an incredible luxury that we can even consider things like whether we feel engaged or meaning in our work.
There's meaning to be had in all honest work that serves a purpose. It's up to you to find it. If people are going to sit around and passively wait for someone to "inspire" them, they're either going to be very unsatisfied with their lives or fall prey to the first charismatic huckster that comes along. Nobody else can tell you how to find meaning in your life, you have to make it for yourself.
> The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.
I disagree. A business isn't a summer camp or a YMCA, and while schools should obviously help a student to find their own way, it also exists to instruct without the teacher being required to act like a tik tok influencer in front of a class of 30+ students.
What with the constant infantilization of employees or students in US? My boss or my teacher aren't there to entertain me like I'm in a daycare.
I’ve heard people refer to work (half jokingly) as “adult daycare.” At face value, I dismissed it, but if you think about it from a societal perspective, it’s not completely false. Most of us are toiling away so that society keeps running. It’s like being in a fiefdom and our overlords need to supply bread & circus for our pleasure- difference being were being issued tokens to find bread & circuses on our own.
I don't think we need to think of it on the basis of blame at all, on the societal level. Individually, I think you have a better life if you have or learn conscious control of your attention. But on a large scale, if the population doesn't have immunity, it is a problem to deal with somehow. Either by "engaging" or changing the structures of institutions. But we have to have some methods of doing this, which are hard to come by when the problems are new.
The methods of engaging me employed by modern video games and fast-cut video platforms seem off-putting to me. More importantly I don't see how we can do anything meaningful when communicating like this. Life is largely search, not only exploitation of rewards.
If I was a teacher maybe I'd come up with some strategy, probably a compromise, but don't treat it as a thing they don't do just because they're lazy. It's like expecting that all people will deal with smog by designing and building their own air cleaning devices.
Hmm, we kind of did deal with smog by requiring everyone to get their own air cleaning device (catalytic converters). They didn’t have to design and build it themselves though.
My personal opinion is that this somewhat leads individuals to become entitled and less independently driven. And where does this end? People should be able to dig into things that are not always rainbows and unicorns. Inspiration is always nice though, but I don't like the idea of being spoonfed and just wrapping everything in nice shiny packages.
Sure. But there are also plenty of very necessary jobs which are not permanently engaging.
Airline pilots tend to do love aviating, but spend most of their flight standing by in case the autopilot goes awry. Most medical doctors don't have a massive catastrophe happening around them all of the time. Artisan bakers still have to knead dough.
All in all, most work generally is boring rather than fulfilling.
I think in all your examples aspects of the work may indeed be incredibly boring, but that doesn't mean it's not ultimately rewarding, fulfilling, or motivating.
At least in the case of pilots, doctors, and bakers.
One reason to at least first suspect something other than educators is that education hasn't changed all that much in a long time. As far as I can tell at least the way elementary school and high school worked when I was in them circa 1970 is the same way it had been working for at least 20 years before that and the way it continued to work for the next 50 years until we had a year of pandemic disruptions.
When you've got something that has worked pretty much the same for 70+ years and something appears to go wrong in the last several years it makes sense that your primary suspects should be things that changed around the time that it started to go wrong.
When you see a polished video clip on the net, it's the cumulated result of an hour or more work for less than a minute of your time. Simply put, it doesn't scale.
If I spend hours making a video clip and put it up on YouTube it would be true, because no one follows me on YouTube.
The most views anything I ever posted got was just over 100, which was a short video of something weird that happened when I set my water bottle on top of my car that I no longer remember enough college physics to explain [1].
Second most was a water pipe like at the building my office was in [2]. That got a bit over 80.
Third has a little over 50. That was some chestnut backed chickadees landing on my hand to eat peanuts [3]. That's closely followed by some antics of a Douglas squirrel and an Eastern Gray squirrel on my front deck [4]. (BTW, if anyone watches the one with the chickadees, try watching in slow motion or single stepping. Some of them have cool poses that go by way to fast at normal speed to see).
I'm not actually sure why any of those have more than a handful views as they were put there to share with friends.
There are a couple in the 30s, which are the only ones I actually tried to get anyone other than friends to look at. Those are videos of my bike's rear tire on a stand, with a weight on the rim, rotated and allowed to swing back and forth. I posted those to a bicycling group, and asked if it was possible to determine from how long it took the oscillations to damp if my hub was in need of lubrication.
Everything else has been in the single digits.
So yeah, if I put any effort into a video (which I think only the leak and the chickadees one involved anything more than just selecting one continuous clip from something filmed in one take on my phone) it doesn't scale.
But what about people who do get a lot of views? If someone spends an hour on a video and a million different each spend a minute watching it that has scales pretty well. There are lots of people that can spend an hour on a video and probably get people spending years worth of time watching.
The educational system and employers have a responsibility to be engaging and enriching if they want interest and passion back from their students/employees.
I'm not saying there's no problem with overconsumption of cheap media. But I think we're too quick to jump to blaming individuals. We can just as much flip the question around and ask what educators and employers are doing to keep students engaged and feeling motivated by what they do.