its so much better nowadays. I"m 40 now and I'm low key jelous of kids today. Today if you want to learn to code, you have freecode camp and chatgpt to ask questions. Math? there's mathacademy and khanacademy. There are so many options now for learning stuff that we didn't have
Learning opportunities are indeed better. But time sinks such as TikTok and YouTube have gotten exponentially better (read: addictive). I think there's a higher overall likelihood that a kid gets trapped in doomscrolling than in Khan Academy.
I'm 36, but to be fair even in late 90s when we were kids we had
1) Forums like askanexper(can't remember the exact name)
2) great books like sams teach yourself in 24 hours and a habit to spend time in library
3) most importantly not as much competition as we have today. There were like a 2-3 kids in my schools of 2k who were into programming. Today that would be approaching half.
Very difficult to take advantage of if you don't have good control over your brain.
I am learning bit and pieces on how to do this but it's a long and uncertain process. Conflict monitoring is willpower is a new concept to me but it gave me a framework on how to improve my discipline over time.
