Where is your context? How do you understand your temporal and geographical place in the world? How does anything make sense if there's no structure to put it in? And how do you connect one idea to another when you don't have any ideas to begin with?
It has got to be a generational thing. The movies they watch, the books they read are all soap operas about one thing or another. This is the snowflake generation - if any real disaster ever occurred they would be in a state of shock and out of commission. The future needs old people to keep the young alive.
I did the same growing up and I don’t recall much prompting by my parents to do it though they did gulp hard and bought the World Books and paid them out and bought the year book for updates for almost 40 years.
I read them all from start to finish over the years. Usually on Sunday afternoon after Church since we didn’t do work on the farm on Sunday.
I poured over maps and have all my life to find things in far away places that I may never see otherwise.
Curiosity and Discovery, I can’t imagine life without them.
One of the biggest problems I had in school when doing areport on a subject was that I would start with our household encyclopedia. As I am flipping through, looking for the subject in question, something shiny would attract my attention, and I would spend an hour or two reading about things that had nothing whatsoever with what I was suppsedly working on.
The end result is that my head is crammed full of seemingly endless facts about things that have nothing to do with anything 'normal' people know.