Why does everything you do have to go `toward actually improving your life`? Why can't we do stuff just for fun anymore?

Even worse, his comment assumes you can't improve your enjoyment of life just by learning about things you like.

After a while, this never ending river of UTF-8 characters and RGB pixels gets a little old.

You realize all the time you've spent whiling away so much time, imagining that it's all building up to something even better than yesterday's tide of serialized data streams, that your youth has faded, and you're still just staring at a lightbulb masked behind a screen of wires, listening to air disturbed by oscillating magnets, and nothing more.

But the worst part of this, is looking up, only to find a city full of similar people all still hopelessly enthralled by the discharge of so many lithium-ion batteries perturbed by some nearby electric coil.

I don't know what you expect, staring into the Internet. - Nietzsche

You will always find something valuable that will improve your life. For example, software engineers can apply the abstract learning from Coursera's course about functional programming in Scala to any other language. Focused learning can generate more tangible and immediate returns, but don't discount the value of learning generally. It's likely to be a significant factor in keeping you relevant and consistently employable over the long term.

Synthesis. To a point you're right. A lot of this may just be education porn. But a greater breadth and depth of knowledge permits synthesis. Computer science, computing in general, is one of the greatest examples of synthesis.

Starting with mathematics, the a theoretical machine, augmented by a language hierarchy gleaned from linguistics, with models based in real biological and physical systems. Even today's hotness in machine learning with ANNs is founded in an attempt to understand intelligence based on the physical structure of the mind.

Perhaps much of this can be recreated without being exposed to mathematics, chemistry, physics, biology, philosophy, linguistics, and other fields. But I imagine the insights needed to develop the first ANN model, the first language designed around a CFG would've taken far longer to develop in that narrow worldview.