How much of that is googles fault and how much of that is that it’s hard to have a good idea for a personal project and follow through with it?
When I was in my 20s all my friends (young single kid less, so plenty of free time) would often TALK about wanting to do a project but few ever did.
I wouldn’t be surprised if for most people the marginal sense of accomplishment and meaning is just higher by working on their day job (which is already cush) than trying to hack a random idea together.
Just guessing here but sounds like you had to have interest in someone else’s crappy/uninteresting idea, which likely was rare. It’s like those cofounder matching sites, most people have a crappy/uninteresting idea they want others to help them with. People without ideas go there and immediately turn away.
There certainly was some of that: dumb ideas that were going nowhere.
Also a lot of genuinely interesting projects had managers with no idea how they could use a 20%-er. Especially if they didn't really believe the person was reliable.
When I was in my 20s all my friends (young single kid less, so plenty of free time) would often TALK about wanting to do a project but few ever did.
I wouldn’t be surprised if for most people the marginal sense of accomplishment and meaning is just higher by working on their day job (which is already cush) than trying to hack a random idea together.