I am really jealous of what the more creative/motivated kids growing up today have access to.

When I was a teenager not long ago, I was mostly motivated by cheating in games which got me learning basic scripting for keyboard/mouse macros which then led me to increasingly complicated stuff for botting.

But there are so many more motivating factors for learning how to code today, and they have never been more accessible. For example if you want porn of your high school crush? You gotta train your own deepfake for that. You will start off as a script kiddie but when you grow up you can tell people you've been training neural networks since you were 12.