I played a little as a child (enough to beat my dad, who was a complete beginner). I've become quite addicted in the last couple of years (and yes, I'm 40 now). While I agree with the sentiments that "it's a total waste of time and I should learn something useful", it's still fun to have a challenging distraction.
One thing I've found it quite good for is _learning to lose_. I _hate_ losing at games, even now, but, the nice thing about being a beginner chess player is that there are bazillions of people better than you to play against, and lose to!.
On the topic of improving, as others have said, the training puzzles on lichess are great. I've also got quite a lot of value out of [0] chessable.com . Nice little site, teaches you some basic openings which are really fun when people fall into the traps!
You mention chessable so I would like to shout out my own project. I created listudy[0] that does a lot of the things that chessable does, but is also free open source[1]. On my site I use spaced repetition to memorize openings. Unfortunately there are not many studies on there right now but hopefully this will change in the future.
[0] https://listudy.org/
[1] https://github.com/ArneVogel/listudy
I never played against good chess players really I once went 8 years without losing while playing every chance I got. Now that I’ve found good players to play against, I'm honestly scared to play because I’m sure to be worse than somebody. I would honestly appreciate some elaboration on how you learned to lose.
One thing I've found it quite good for is _learning to lose_. I _hate_ losing at games, even now, but, the nice thing about being a beginner chess player is that there are bazillions of people better than you to play against, and lose to!.
On the topic of improving, as others have said, the training puzzles on lichess are great. I've also got quite a lot of value out of [0] chessable.com . Nice little site, teaches you some basic openings which are really fun when people fall into the traps!
[0] https://www.chessable.com/