A hand-saw will fall a one-off tree faster than it takes you to learn how to use a chainsaw. But if you invest the time to learn the chainsaw your gains pay off after 2—4 trees.
Sure, but again, imagine you are a logger in Montana in the 1940s (or whenever practical handheld chainsaws were invented). You may spend all day sharpening your crosscut - but learning a chainsaw would require ordering one from the general store, waiting weeks or months for it to ship, learning to use it - all for a benefit that you only know of from the copy in the catalogue. If you've never seen anyone use a chainsaw before, or vouch for their effectiveness, it would be easy to dismiss as a fad.
That’s gen z. It’s an aversion to learning and groking a deep understanding. Older people learn how to invest in building knowledge that solves a series of problems quicker over the long haul.
Not my experience at all with Gen Z, nor with older people. In fact, it is often the opposite - younger people are more interested in learning new things, while the older ones are stuck in their ways and resistant to change.
Surveys show that around 50 yrs ago around 80% students prioritized developing a meaningful philosophy of life above making money. College freshmen have been surveyed every year since then. Gradually, those numbers have completely inverted.
Likely this has something to do with the increased cost of college and lack of economic security. It's easy to be a hippie when you have a trust fund backing you up, and it is easy to talk about your "meaningful philosophy of life" when you graduate with little or no debt to a nearly guarenteed good paying job.