Caught in the Study Web

> [...] On Study Web, while stressed, students have accepted their lot—they’re not investigating the rightness or wrongness of the pressurized environment of the Gen Z student or asking whether college is worth it at all.

Seems to me that's kinda the nature of a "study motivation" stream.

There's a place for questioning the premise - but a study motivation stream ain't it.

Every runner knows you don't have to complete a marathon, it's a lot of work for little reward, you shouldn't push past the point of injury, and you can drop out of training at any time. But if someone asks you for motivation to complete a marathon you don't question the premise, you just tell them "go on, you can do it"

The StudyWeb seems to be an emergent phenomenon across existing social media platforms, with an intense focus on helping young students pass the current system's institutionalized checks/tests/hoops.

What about MOOCs, all of those cool Youtube lecture playlists, in-depth articles, that cool textbook some enterprising prof published online for free? I can't count the number of times I think "I would definitely love to learn this!" but inevitably I lose focus, motivation, or time. I want something where other people can join me, commit to regular meetings, share in a space where we're all learning the same thing.

I know communities have grown up organically around various YouTubers, bloggers, and specific topics – and the StudyWeb definitely has aspects of this – but the best current advice for finding a learning group is "search for a reddit or Discord". There's got to be a better way.

> Though the number of deaths by suicide among young people has decreased during the pandemic, likely due to “greater parental oversight,”...

How can you use the first statistic as evidence while simultaneously writing off the lower death rate? You could just as easily make the opposite argument, saying that deaths are down due to reduced pressure on kids but ER visits are up due to higher parental oversight of the subset of kids that are still struggling.

(I'm not saying that's more likely than the first interpretation; just poking holes in the logic of the argument laid out in the article.)

1. A product of social media itself—the usual stuff it gets vilified for: zero-sum attention economy, promoting negative self-esteem, etc.

2. The average Zoomer rising to meet very real pressures that previously did not exist.

3. The web providing new visibility to a neurotic personality that has always existed.

It's probably a mix, but I wouldn't be surprised if this could mostly be attributed to the third point. I can think of people from my own school days who would be caught up in something like this. I didn't like any of them.

I used those same technique, even podomoro but I am under zero pressure. Instead I learn for pleasure and to achieve non-academic goals.

I've found libraries, cafés, and labs to be more productive work environments than typical offices. I think it's because 1) they were either quiet or had constant background noise, 2) there was more privacy/anonymity/freedom, and 3) more people seemed to be actively working on projects and not just trying to look busy.

Also probably fewer interruptions - interruptions are ruinous for any task that requires concentration.

who the talking about gen Z, when perverts of gen X are still studying, in med school.