I kinda feel like what you're getting at is that your iteration of autopilot is better than others. In the abstract most people are pulling information out of the web and ostensibly using it to construct a model. The difference here is priorities and to some extent the framework of moral schematics.
I would expect you're under the impression that what you're doing is productive, and productivity is good. That's not necessarily the case though - that's just a lens that post-Christian western society has adopted for scrutinizing individuals, and frankly it's a little harmful.
My point is that it's easier than ever before to improve yourself through readily accessible resources. I wish more people would.
It can be through learning about different people's experiences, considering alternative opinions, thinking about views that oppose your own, studying social sciences, having conversations, and so on.
From what I've pieced together, you have some value system that assesses goodness of growth. Growth is arbitrary and personal. You've set up a red herring in your idea of growth.
To frame it from first principals - we live in a continually evolving system, it's basically mandatory for any individual to "grow" in more ways than one: firstly, people have to navigate that ever-changing environment and as such are exposed to novel information and they have (at a biological level) to update their priors; secondly, at a biological level, invisible though it may be, people are in constant flux internally, now it's speculation, but I'd posit that at a biological level emotions, and boredom, and restlessness are all evolutionary features to press people towards some point, and as a sub-point to this, we're constantly remodeling our brains with our minds and thus I would posit we can confer "growth" as, ostensibly, an individuals model is constantly reorienting itself closer to the ground truth that the stimuli from the environment inculcates.
What I'm saying is that from my view, the contour you've used to define growth is a trajectory towards some point /you/ approve of, some average of things that are made visible to you by others. It seems you want more people to conform to your trajectory, which hey, that's fine, but you shouldn't harbor the expectation of people to do so. Some people want to memorize trivia about Game of Thrones so they can be the go-to authority in their social circle on the topic. Other people like to ride out their cognitive-emotional rollercoasters while rolling around in bed late into the day. Other people keep their growth dead silent. And every other conceivable permutation of that is going on right now, it just doesn't look productive.
And it's good this way. If everybody conformed to one particular trajectory most would quickly be left behind. If everybody followed a single trajectory, we'd lose the treasure of the many diverse forking paths that make up the human space.
It's everywhere. From Quora where people from a certain country rush to type a non-answer quoting a useless memorized definition to your doctor.
But also plenty of people have anxieties about their livelihood these days thanks to wages, the economy, and the state of the world. It might be baffling because you lack perspective on that front by not having a shit life!
There are legitimate questions to ask, "Is book Y worth the money?" "If I learn Z, will it increase my job prospects?" But "should I learn X?" is a bad question, and only something as awful as years mandatory schooling can make someone think it is a good one.
In my experience lot of people operate on 'autopilot', and I find it incredibly sad. They have all of humanity's knowledge accessible to them in their hands through phones, I wish they would sometimes stop to search and read and learn and expand their internal knowledge bases. I wish people were more curious and open-minded.
I've personally always derived a lot of joy from constantly learning and improving myself and it's baffling to me how little growth and positive change I see in many of the people around me over the years.