I do have formal education in the field, but that doesn’t mean that I’m easily capable of e.g. writing a module for Nginx or even most website frameworks or knowledgable enough about administration to feel comfortable exposing a dynamic website (as opposed to static HTML+CSS) to the internet.

A lot of it is learning by doing, though, and for a lot of things books are a great resource (some stuff is outdated as soon as it’s published, but general system administration or programming knowledge doesn’t get outdated that fast).

I think there are more media-related distractions available, such as movies, tv shows, porn, sports, music, social media (though sm can also be used to incite/organize protests/riots), plus the old mainstay of religion (which is also a propaganda tool, but in most cases pro-government). But yeah, all these distractions definitely help. It’s like Rome’s Bread And Circus.