> For me that desert of despair was fun and nothing could have stopped me. > To me educational efforts for adults are misplaced. My theory is that the differe

> For me that desert of despair was fun and nothing could have stopped me. > To me educational efforts for adults are misplaced. My theory is that the difference is just that (some) young people have more spare time. If you have lots of time, then the inherent fun of learning stuff makes it fun to wander around learning stuff. But if you don't have much time, then you prioritize the things that relate to your goals, and then unexpected things in between you and the goal are stressful obstacles. If you have tons of time, then your default state (alternative activity) is boredom, and learning anything interesting saves you from that, so you're glad you did it. But if you don't have much time, then learning something only to find that it wasn't as useful as you thought it would be (which often happens when you don't know what you don't know, but are trying to learn) is disappointing, because you know you sacrificed other important things (in retrospect, things that were more important) to spend time learning that.