Have we made things too convenient for  ourselves? It sounds like a dumb question, but the user-friendly, experience optimized,  child-safe, seamless, frictionless, forgiving, and intuitive world we have built around ourselves  may genuinely be undermining our ability to learn basic concepts, take basic responsibility, and  even hold down a basic job. Multiple studies on different areas ranging from personal finance to  career skills down to basic critical thinking have highlighted this trend. And unfortunately, it only  seems to be getting worse. Modern technology has undoubtedly made our lives more convenient. But  that isn't necessarily the problem just by itself.

And while it's easy and honestly a little bit  funny to point at the kids these days with their iPads and their 67s, this by itself is really not  that different from what every generation has said about every other generation that came after them  since the industrial revolution. Not many of you watching would know how to use a city directory  to plan out an unknown route because almost all of us have a perfectly up-to-date GPS sitting  in our pocket at all times. There is arguably no real difference between that and people from the  early 1900s not knowing how to start a fire with sticks. In both cases, modern technology had just  made those skills irrelevant. So then what's the difference today? Well, that's what researchers  are trying to figure out because, well, there really is something different today. And there are  some theories that are each worth understanding.

But there is also the problem of what these tools  are actually trying to achieve. Does Facebook actually want you making real connections? Do  dating apps want you to find healthy compatible relationships? buy now pay later, making informed  financial decisions, Khi understanding statistics, Robin Hood beating the market, or well, yeah, even  YouTube giving you the content you were looking for rather than the entertainment they mindlessly  serve you. In a fight between easier and better, it does feel like the market is overwhelmingly  favoring easier. And then of course above all of these today there are AI tools that almost  certainly have the ability to augment and enhance real thinking and productivity but are almost  universally being sold as a cost-effective way to just replace it. The tools that we have used  to make our lives easier have become exponentially more complex while the tasks they are enabling  have become extremely simple by design.

So on top of all of this, we should probably  also ask ourselves, what happens if we pass down a world that future generations are too dumb  to maintain? Literally tens of millions of kids who may never catch up. And so this has to be, you  know, for me it's like a national emergency. I'm working. I'm trying to get it back so that we can  have this be. Look at that. Look at that angle.

Some folks have been trying to push forward  these kinds of financial markets for years, but it never happened. You know, how did you make  this work? Right now, you need various accounts to trade across all these markets. was a continued  downturn that accelerated during the pandemic with little signs of slowing down. Now, here's some key  takeaways that I found in this study. 72% of teens say that they often or sometimes feel peaceful  when their phone less. When you use Apple Pay, that's real money. That's true American dollars.  Okay, so before we get into exactly how we are conveniencing ourselves into being big dum  dums, we should probably address whether this is even real or just the same intergenerational  bickering that has existed forever. Because, well, for most of modern history, it really has just  been a baseless complaint. Every single generation since the industrial revolution has looked at  the next one and decided that they were softer, lazier, and less capable. And every time they  have been largely wrong. Through the entirety of the 20th century, measured intelligence across  the developed world actually rose by about three IQ points per decade in what psychologists call  the Flynn effect. Sure, we stopped learning how to run a printing press, but we built computers that  gave us access to an almost infinite library of knowledge, and we got smarter in the fields that  counted. This trend had been seen in pretty much every country that had industrialized until very  recently. Since about the mid 2000s, researchers in Norway, Denmark, Finland, the UK, France,  Germany, and the Netherlands have all reported the Flynn effect either stalling or reversing. Here  in America, the National Assessment of Educational Progress has shown the biggest decline in reading  since 1990, and the first ever score drops in mathematics for school age students. And the most  recent OECD PISA results showed math performance across the developed world falling at a rate that  had never been measured before. So, for the first time in the history of actually measuring this  stuff, generations really have started getting a little bit dumber over time. And some generations  are getting dumber much faster than others. Now, the immediate reaction to this trend is to blame  the screens or the kids. But we aren't just getting dumber generation to generation. As time  goes on, even older people who weren't raised on a diet of cocoa melons and skippy toilets  have also developed a case of the stupid.

This becomes especially fascinating albeit a  little scary when you consider the environmental factors we are not dealing with today like leaded  gasoline and whatever passed for painkillers back in the day. So there is a little bit more  going on here and there is no silver bullet.

There are however multiple headwinds that  should at least be considered in parallel.

The first is that a lot of the modern technology  that has been rewarded in the marketplace has not really expanded human capability. It has  just removed friction. And removing friction very often removes the very thing that was making  people capable in the first place. Take something as simple as balancing a checkbook. Almost  nobody on this side of 40 has ever done it.

And nobody is mourning that particular chore. But  manually reconciling every transaction against a paper statement forced people to actually look  at every dollar they had spent. Modern payment systems do the exact opposite of that and they  do it by design. Something like buy now pay later is specifically engineered to separate a  person as much as possible from their spending decisions because the whole business model is to  reduce the friction of consumption. Now we know this is not just a simple anecdote because these  companies use it as a selling point when they are trying to sign retailers up to work with their  platform. So, they really aren't even trying to hide it. Theoretically, you could export all of  your transactions into an Excel sheet at the end of the month and do a proper review, but let's  be honest, nobody uh claomaxing their Coacella weekend is actually doing that. Apparently, this  is a thing. Anyway, there is a very good reason why ease has become more desirable to investors  than capability. The tools we have built to make our lives easier have become extremely complicated  and extremely expensive to produce. Which means for them to pay for themselves, increasingly their  audience has needed to become the product rather than just the user of the tool. User-friendly  and innocent looking payments mean less thinking, more spending, and ultimately more revenue for the  companies designing them. Facebook, Tik Tok, and yes, even YouTube are not really tools of social  connection or entertainment. They are tools to harvest attention and are clearly working. And a  lot of other modern tools have been designed to be user-friendly at the direct expense of versatility  or practical application. Kids who have grown up with computers their whole lives often have less  of a clue how to troubleshoot basic problems or even print a document because the tablets they  grew up on were designed to hide the plumbing behind a clean interface. Now, none of this is  inherently a bad thing. Convenience is good and we shouldn't be manufacturing difficulty just for the  sake of it. But being able to simply figure things out, adapt when something doesn't work perfectly,  and take basic responsibility for our own actions is a huge part of the value that humans currently  bring to the workforce, the economy, and society in general. When every tool we interact with is  designed to require less of us, it should not be a surprise that we end up having less to give.  And the consequences of that have already started showing up across three distinct areas of the  economy, each worse than the last. So, it's time to learn how money works to find out what happens  when we build a world too convenient to get out of. Speaking of convenience, the reason every  app, every checkout page, and every subscription button feels suspiciously easy these days is  not an accident. It's marketing psychology, and the people who study it know exactly which  buttons in your brain to push. If you want to see how all of this gets made, the team at HubSpot  put together a free guide called the science of marketing psychology. And it breaks down the  actual cognitive biases that companies use to get you to click, buy, and come back. It walks through  stuff like anchoring, loss aversion, and the decoy effect, which is the reason why there's always a  medium popcorn priced weirdly close to the large one. What I like about it is that it's not just  a list of tricks. It explains the research behind why these things work on us, even when we know  they're happening. Whether you run a business, write online, or just want to understand why you  keep buying things you didn't plan to buy, it's worth a read. You can grab it for free at the link  in my description or scan the QR code on screen.

Okay, so these incentives have been quietly  rewarding the easier is better model for decades now, and the consequences are starting to show  up in a few places we really can't afford them.

And the first of those is in the workplace.  Younger generations are according to more or less every industry survey over the last 2 years  struggling at work. A survey from intelligent.com last year found that 47% of managers cited a  lack of initiative as a serious problem with recent hires. And nearly 4 in 10 employers  said they now actively prefer older workers over recent grads even after accounting for  the expectation of higher salaries. Now again, every generation of managers in history has  complained that their new hires are soft, but the specific nature of the complaint this  time is different. These workers have spent their entire lives being coddled in the role of  student and consumer, which meant every awkward decision was handled for them long before they  ever had a first day on the job. Both of those roles have been aggressively re-engineered over  the last two decades to remove every possible moment of ambiguity. Teachers grade on rubrics  that are published in advance. Learning apps tell people exactly which button to press next.  Dating apps remove the awkward human element of approaching someone in person. Food delivery apps  remember your order. And investment apps round up your spare change and invested on your behalf.  Unironically, many consumers report feeling overwhelmed by the choice of what piece of content  to watch on their preferred streaming service. So, they just give up and go back to scrolling through  content that is picked for them. And I mean, I personally want to sound superior to this  point, but I have absolutely done this myself.

Every single one of these improvements has  quietly removed a moment where a person used to have to stop, figure something out, and decide for  themselves. Then on day one of their actual job, somebody hands them a task with no rubric, no  tutorial, no autoplay, and no obvious right answer, and asks them to go and figure it out,  which feels like a character flaw right up until you realize it's the exact behavior their entire  upbringing rewarded. And the really awkward bit for employers is that being genuinely good  at just figuring things out is genuinely one of the most valuable skills anybody can bring  to any career. It is the exact thing managers have usually trusted humans over software to do.  Because software by its nature still struggles with a problem it hasn't seen before. Although  unfortunately if the studies are to be believed, we are simultaneously getting worse at this  while the clankers are getting better. But more on that later, which brings us to the second  problem, and it starts much earlier than anybody's first job. The iPad Kid meme has started being a  measurable phenomenon. Across the developed world, there is a clear trend of declining, but more  importantly, diverging test scores. The OECD's latest piece of results showed that math scores  across its member countries fell by roughly 15 points between 2018 and 2022. That was the single  largest consecutive drop since the test was first administered. Now, even though this did fit into  a longerterm trend, the larger than average drop could have been written off as one-time effects  of COVID teaching from home. But the concerning detail was that these test scores didn't fall  evenly. The NAP found that the top performing students largely held their ground while the  bottom performing students fell off a cliff, suggesting that the convenience economy isn't  dragging everybody down equally. It is dragging down the kids with the least ability to push back  against it. The remote learning shakeup didn't affect all students equally either. For advanced  and already disciplined students, it was largely fine. A quiet room and a laptop let them learn  at their own pace without classroom distractions.

For underperforming students, well, it gave  them much easier access to Fortnite instead.

User-friendly and highly engaging technology is  generally hard to snap yourself out of, even for fully grown adults who should in theory have  better self-control than a teenager. Actually, removing these distractions takes either serious  self-discipline or serious parental discipline.

And for a lot of households, that second one is a  luxury they simply cannot afford. A single parent working two jobs is not going to police screen  time the same way a wealthier household can when they can afford a stay-at-home parent, private  tuition, or a school that has banned phones entirely. So, the class gap compounds. Wealthier  kids are more likely to end up in environments that still make them figure things out. Everybody  else is more likely to end up in environments explicitly designed to never ask them to. And  then on top of all of this, we have AI, which is the third and probably the biggest of these  compounding problems. In theory, large language models are a genuinely powerful learning tool for  a disciplined student or professional. They can explain a concept a dozen different ways, simulate  tutoring, and take a lot of the drudgery out of real knowledge work. Sure, they like to make a lot  of [ __ ] up on the fly, but so do regular human educators, and some models can be asked to provide  sources and citations along the way. In practice, well, that's not really how most people have been  using them. The Digital Education Council's 2024 survey found that 86% of university students now  use generative AI in their studies and separate research from best colleges found that more than  half of them used it specifically to cheat an assignment or an exam. Teachers trying to catch  this are fighting an arms race they are quietly losing because the detection tools are themselves  wrong enough to be effectively useless in a disciplinary setting, which has led to an entire  cohort of students passing through school without ever doing the exact activity that used to build  the figuring things out muscle in the first place.

And the job market has gone through a mirror image  of the same thing. Applicants use AI to fire off hundreds of customized résumés and cover letters  a week. Employers respond by running their own AI filters over the resulting flood of applications,  rejecting most of them before a human ever sees them. The end result is a hiring process  where a machine is writing the application, another machine is reading it, and a real human  is just getting a polite email saying, "We have decided to go in another direction." And while all  of this is happening, AI is being sold to schools as a cost-effective way to replace teachers and to  companies as a cheap way to replace their junior workers who would on a normal career path have  been the ones actually doing the work that teaches people how to figure things out. Every layer of  the system that used to teach people how to think through an unfamiliar problem is being quietly  removed and sold back to us as progress. Now, there is an obvious fix to almost all of this. You  could put friction back in harder curricula with no open book policies. Phones out of school,  real consequences for AI cheating, hiring processes that involve an actual human reading  an actual piece of work from an actual candidate, financial products that actually make you look  at what you are spending before you spend it, and programs that prioritize functionality over ease  of use. Almost none of this is going to happen, and the reasons why are not mysterious. The market  rewards the frictionless product and any single business that tries to add friction back in loses  instantly to a competitor that doesn't. Parents cannot win a technology war against companies  with literal billions of dollars and teams of behavioral scientists engineered specifically to  keep their kids engaged. Regulators who, to put it generously, are at least a generation older  than the technology they are meant to regulate have no real framework for any of this. but that  there is a school system that's going to start um making sure that first graders or even preks  have A1 teaching, you know, every year starting, you know, that far down in the grades. And that's  just a that's a wonderful thing. And budget cuts to public schools mean that every education system  is leaning harder into AI, not less, because a chatbot that costs nothing will always win the  line item fight against a human teacher that costs a salary. From the market's point of view, things  are already working exactly as intended. And if you want further proof of that, go and watch  this video next to find out how we are slowly becoming unemployable. And don't forget to like  and subscribe to keep on learning how money works.