Sailing around the world costs money, but you can learn about other places through other people sharing their experiences on tiktok. There are livestreams teaching language, where you can get a much more personalized teaching and your questions answered without judgement for interrupting, there are carpenters sharing useful tricks, and showing how to build things for yourself. There are livestreams showing how to operate a crane at a shipping port, and what that career is like. TikTok has a lot more than the dancing, meowing, and giggling, although if that's what you watch a lot of and interact with, it will happily give you only that, but that's a user problem, not a platform problem.

So what? Every generation has their form of entertainment. How is this worse than reading a book or watching TV or playing a video game for fun? Or spending your time on Lemmy? Or really just doing anything for fun where you don't expect an outcome. I don't want to work every living minute.

Also yeah, you could learn a language a year if you do it every day but

1. It needs time to get into it
2. It's exhausting
3. It's repetitive and gets boring fast.

Social media is mostly used if you don't have anything else to do and can't just leave. So like on the toilet or in school. Also who says they aren't doing something productive while watching? It makes repetitive tasks less boring. So you can totally still learn carpentry while watching TikTok or anything really.

Time you enjoy isn't time bad spend. Why do anything you hate doing? How does sailing around the world or learning a new language makes you enjoy your life more? Also: how is sailing the sea more productive than watching TikTok when most of the time, you do nothing on the ship.