I feel like a lot of people miss the forest for the trees when pursuing knowledge, that is, they see learning as a means for achieving something else. The knowledge they acquire must serve them is some way, usually the true final goal seems to be either money or feeding the ego. Spent hours learning a complex web technology? Well, it's usually done to get a well paying job or to feel that you're a good programmer, smart enough to tackle complex challenges.

Not that these two things are necessarily bad, we all need money to live and is nice to have confidence in one's ability, especially when that confidence is backed up by actual ability. The problem arises when we reduce learning to only its byproducts, when it's much more than that.

Learning, the process of understanding the world and, through that, of oneself, is a beautiful and rewarding pursuit on its own. What we get from it's useful, but it shouldn't be the ultimate reason we pursue it. It can be a motivator, many times I have learned things due to external reasons (for school or work), but its not the ultimate reason for my learning, it was simply a catalyst for something that I already had a deep desire for. Not the thing itself, the object of learning, but for the actual process of understanding it. It's akin to child's play. Children can acquire abilities while playing which can then be applied in other areas of their life to gain things. But that is not their ultimate reason for it, they play because is fun. I learn, and believe will all should learn, because is fun.

And to the poster's other reason for sadness, i.e that LLMs are getting smarter, remember that these robots don't learn by any means, unless one considers learning consuming information only to spit it back out partly digested. Learning is much more that, it requires life and, perhaps, even soul. A machine can't feel its soul soar upon realizing the limitless bounds of knowledge, it has no soul and it has no feelings.