focus is needed because we are the most distracted generation in history!

Why the distraction? Is it apathy preventing focus, or a high availability of information? Previously it has been a good thing to have an understanding of math, physics, economics, Latin, geography, starting a fire and killing wolves on your goddam property.

Then corporations placed a high value on specialized skills and knowledge. With books, long boring fucking books, as the best venue of research, it took awhile to get good at one thing. Now there are tutorials, video guides, and other very accessible sources of good information on nearly any subject.

I think we are exiting a system of valued specialization to accessible specialized education that enables the broad education our forefathers enjoyed.

The wheel in the sky keeps on turning

Iäm so focused. You can see that because Im browsing devrant.

@gorsamp You are right about education focus changing to more specialized fields. However we ARE indeed a lot more distracted.

I can see this on myself since I'm old enough to had learned much of my stuff without the internet, and young enough to successfully adapt to the changing world of computing.

When I was in school, I used to buy maybe 1 book per year, and I loved development so much that I wouldn't just glance over it and move on, but I'd make sure I squeezed every bit of knowledge I could, because I had no other sources. I spent a lot of time on it, most of it wasted because there are better sources that I didn't have access to.

Today we all have access to so much stuff, for free, but that didn't change developers. That didn't thrust me into knowledge with unprecedented speeds, and didn't contribute to people being more successful developers at a younger age.

Because with all of that, we got social media, youtube, and all that stuff that steals our attention from studying.

@AndSoWeCode But has it measurably made them worse developers, or are they just ALSO watching YouTube?

Trust me, I go on YouTube for music and nothing else, I don't watch twitch, and I generally don't watch TV, I would love to say others are distracted BUT watching millions consume this shit I have to say there is some positivity to stay sane.

In economics we learn that people act out of rational self interest. If it makes sense to be distracted, there must be an underlying evolved behavior that favors this.

Evolution favors high fat and salt intake because we have proportionally larger brains than most other animals, but that can be bad. Are we at a point of saturation, is our progeny overfeeding on bullshit, are we too old to understand it, will humanity carry on?

Only time will tell

@gorsamp I'd say the effect of knowledge availability and distractions have compensated each other to not produce any notable change.

Not too bad, but could've been so much better.

@AndSoWeCode that the ebb and flow have reached equilibrium is the requirement of life