Learning is Boring
"Learning is boring." is a phrase that I made up the other day, and I think it's pretty useful in deciding what is learning and what is.
School is learning. It's boring. But in some sense you are learning something -- whether that's social norms, dodging expectations, how to get away with things, or just about yourself (your opinions, beliefs, likes, hatreds). On the other hand, Youtube most likely is not learning. Unless you spend time watching a course and taking notes and focusing super hard (boring -- in the sense that there is no explicit stimulus for your brain besides the promise of a future reward, like gaining valuable job skill, finishing this course, or something else) or something of the like, in most cases, watching a nice video like a conversation between Jacob Collier and Hank Green is not learning as a primary objective but rather stimulus first and knowledge second (or maybe knowledge is the stimulus -- the point of watching the video is to gain some knowledge as that's cool but maybe not to retain that knowledge and be able to apply it consistently and meaningfully).
My phrase "learning is boring" does not mean learning is always boring or anything boring is learning or something not being boring is also not at all learning (though in logical terms this is the contrapositive which would technically make this statement correct but language is ambiguous and not tight). It's just meant to be a guidepost in determining what the action that I (or you) do is -- "is this boring?" is something I can ask myself when I hit a crossroads that can hopefully point me in the right direction.
Maybe reading this post was boring. Hopefully you learned something though :)