I suppose it would be mostly practical skills, cooking, fixing things. Usually had to be done by people themselves.
Maybe also mental things like navigating (with or without paper map) and remembering their daily and weekly agendas.
What other things would be a big difference with the people today?
Memorizing phone numbers
I feel like it’s still important to remember the numbers of some important contacts, so you can actually call them using somebody elses phone if yours dies or breaks. But I suppose not many people would bother
Lol, not only do I memorize phone numbers of family members, I did my parents taxes so often, I can memorize the social security numbers of all my household members and all their birthdates.
Also I still remember addresses I used to live in.
Same here. I even still remember my phone number from 40 years ago, living as a child in Tehran, Iran. Numbers just stick in my brain.
Mmmm, interesting, can you list off that data along with your mother’s maiden name? It’s uh for a friend…
Sure it’s [data expunged] and [data expunged] and [Error: Security Clearence not found]
Lol, sorry, you seem to lack the credentials. It’s “need-to-know basis” only. :P
Seriously tho, my family is so like… idk I guess “emmeshed”? Like everything is so entangled.
Like my mom literally use my brother’s legal identity to take out loans… and also some assets are put under his name
Also like mom used to not even have a screen lock on the phone until someone robbed her so now there’a a screen lock.
And like I have access to their phones… and sometimes messed with settings and mom got mad at me.
I don’t even have any legal papers in my physical posession except like my state ID, cuz my mom wanted to “keep it safe” for me…
To be fair: I held on to my first US passport as a teen, and I kinda damaged it lol (got it just to make sure my Citizenship status is properly documented in the legal system), never even had a chance to actually use it since parents were so busy all the time.
If there is ever a family issue… oh shit we all know each other’s info, we could theoretically do so much damage to each other like a family “civil war”.
We didn’t memorise numbers! We just remembered them after having to manually dial them a hundred times.
That’s memorization in action
Eh even before the Internet people had other tools to help with this. Physical books with people’s addresses and phone numbers. Specialized holders for various business cards. Yellow pages and white pages. I suppose a lot of incidental memorization is lost but I don’t think it’s really a skill lost so much as the tool changed.
And those tools pre-date the invention of the telephone, so it’s not like people spent hundreds of years memorizing phone numbers before writing was invented.
That skill morphed into remembering user names and passwords.
If you knew how to drive, you most likely knew how to use a manual transmission.
Almost every adult in the UK learns on manual - I’ve known about three people in my life who learned on automatic and are only licensed to drive automatics - but with the rise of electric cars (and an increase in automatics generally) I wonder if my kids will learn.
What I never learned, but which my parents did was exactly when and to use the choke on a car. I know fuel injection made chokes unnecessary and I’ve never driven a car that had one.
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Did u ever use a different kind of motor with one?
I don’t think so. Oh, wait, I have a petrol strimmer / bushcutter that has a choke! So, yes!
Lots of semi truck drivers know how to drive a manual and semi truck driver is one of the most common occupations in the US. Everyone at my company’s location knows how even though we have an all automatic fleet.
Edit: Just to address the premise of the question only a couple of us were driving 50 years ago.
Is it really?
How scary is it to drive down a big hill?
Yeah it really is. Most everyone trained before the last 15 years were likely trained on an asynchronous manual transmission.
In good weather? Only the first few times. In bad weather? I’m on high alert like a dog who knows the mailman is delivering a vacuum cleaner. Take it slow, make sure the brakes work, and know where the runaway ramps are. A manual transmission is usually preferable for mountains for better control or for at least the illusion.
Stay safe out there! Godspeed!
You likely already know this but if anybody else reading is interested, this is because if you test for your commercial license in an automatic then you’re restricted to only automatics. The schools are still teaching manual, so it doesn’t make any sense to learn that then test in an automatic and get that restriction.
This one depends on where you live, I suppose. In some european countries it’s still quite common to learn to drive with a manual.
Quite common as in, I’ve only met one person here in my life who can only drive automatic. Electric cars being more mainstream means many more people are driving automatic, but if you do your licence in an automatic you are not allowed to drive a manual car. So I’d wager over 99% of people can drive a manual. This is in Belgium btw.
I still have a manual
Meeting up with people, no phone. You arrange a place and a time, and you show up, if the other person isn’t there… You wait.
It was super important not to leave people hanging
Recently I have started having to ask hours before a plan is meant to execute, whether the other parties are still attending. Three times out of four I’ve been cancelled on - forgot, too busy, whatever the reasons were.
When was I meant to find out? When I called you asking how far away you are, only to find you’re not coming at all?
Basically, those people were not going with you. I wouldn’t consider them your friends. Friends would at least tell you they are bailing so you don’t go
Sometimes I’ll be getting myself ready to do the thing, but if someone reaches out and gives me an out… Yeah I might just take them up on it. I’m big on canceling plans
Writing in cursive
This is such a good thing. Whenever I look at cursive writing it’s indecipherable. It being included in school curriculums really feels like someone went “no I’m good at writing! Cursive writing is good! Children need to learn it, in fact.”
Do you mean that you can’t read it at all? It’s really close to lettering, it’s just got swoopies attached to most letters. There are only around 4 that you have to know how they’re different, but the rest are super similar.
This is definitely dependent on the person writing. Some cursive is illegible, others is totally fine.
I mean, some non-cursive is totally illegible. My print is pretty bad, but my cursive is fine
That’s true. I learned cursive first, but never really properly. Then learned print instead. Now my writing is a mashup of cursive and print, with the same letter in a single sentence sometimes using different writing styles. Great!
Capital letters:
F, R, and z
There’s a bunch of different systems that vary how close they are to standard print
At this point it’s actually kind of useful as a mild coded writing that excludes idiots.
My cursive is still excellent
Operating a slide rule. Managing a menstruation belt. Navigating adult life without having your own bank account (if you were a woman in the US). Mending clothes, ironing clothes, making clothes.
I gotta ask, menstruation belt?
Before adhesive pads were invented to stick to your underwear, you had to wear a climbing harness and use safety pins to keep your pad in place.
This seems like a skill that deserves to die. Adhesive pads, cups, tampons, etc. seem way better.
I remember seeing this among my grandma’s belongings when I was a kid. It was… grimy.
I didn’t have the faintest idea what it was.Oh dear…
Attention spans.
I, for one, have a great attention span. I can easily spend several hours browsing lemmy shitposts.
What was this in response to?
Oh dear…
Attention spans.
Folks would generally have been better at mental math, or at least working it out on paper, because at the time there was some truth to the notion of “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket.”
I personally don’t consider it bad that we rely more on this little device most of us carry everywhere now. That’s what it’s there for, and using a calculator app is going to generally give more accurate results than trying to crunch numbers in our heads anyway. At least for those of us who aren’t math wizards.
I heard an anecdote that one of the reasons older structures last longer than newer buildings was until the days of using Log Tables, engineers had to round up to the nearest values to match the values in the log table when calculating complex forces, and this rounding compounded when multiplied against other rounded values. Once computers were being used with design, you could calculate the forces exactly to minimize material costs.
I’ve got a log table in the back of one of my reference manuals. The results go up to 6 digits. You aren’t going to get appreciable material savings after 2 digits.
And in some cases like structural steel, the built up members were far more optimized 100 years ago compared to today because the labor required to build the optimized structure was that much cheaper.
I think being good at estimations and having some intuition when something doesn’t match up for a restaurant bill or grocery shop is helpful though. And I don’t think a lot of people would get out their phone to double check the calculation.
But yeah, having this magic rectangle in our pockets is pretty nice.
Dialing in a TV station, with the different bands and antenna tweaking. Then keeping track what and when your shows come on.
Balancing your checkbook.
Dialing in a TV station, with the different bands and antenna tweaking.
That’s what younger siblings were for. Holding the rabbit ears or turning the antenna mast.
Using a rotary phone. looking up a book in a card catalog. The ability to solve your own problems.
I wish I was better at solving my own problems. But also depends on what you consider solving your own problems is, exactly.
I learned early not to rely on other people, so I tended to look up everything I need in books and online.But some problems are not solved with research, or suggestions from others online.
Some problems are only solved by giving yourself time to process them yourself.This is something I’m still lacking in, perhaps because I always searched outside of myself for solutions.
I’m amazed by the solutions some people can come up with without having access to information from books/online.It sounds like you are better at it than most kids these days. I look up solutions all the time. No sense reinventing the wheel. I’ve also spent days on some problem without looking elsewhere for a solution. The dopamine from solving a problem myself is excellent.
Was with you untill the solve your own probles thing. I know of way many people who did not solve their own problems 50 yrs ago, passing their problems to their children instead.
When I was very young around 50 years ago I built a small flashlight using a plastic tick tack box, paper clips,a flashlight bulb and two AAA batteries. No one showed me how I just figured it out. So just because you couldn’t see the problem solvers among you doesn’t mean they were not there.
Yep, and that is still true. I was thinking more of the what to make of your life, family and mental health problems solving though.
I don’t know if you are asking a question about my life choices but I see a therapist regularly. My children answer the phone when I call and when something breaks people come to me for a fix. I’m fine, better than most.
Oh, I meant it in general, wasn’t talking about you specifically, I can see how my use of “you” could lead to confusion though. Anyway, it’s nice to hear you’re doing well :)
The ability to solve your own problems.
IMO, critical thinking is the single most important skill a human can learn. Teach a man to fish and all that.
They don’t/cant learn that in today’s world. They have abandoned learning and switched it out with answers to everything.
@grok can u explane wat bro sed in inglish plees
Look a perfect example.
Idling away the time, being bored.
Doing nothing. That might be the biggest loss in the last decades.
There is just this overtone of restlessness and tension that didn’t seem to be present prior.Also connection with your local community. 50 years ago, it was basically a given. It was part of life.
Now, not so much.
Definitely more than 50 years ago, but this little piece of Americana is interesting
Families often had small nail-manufacturing setups in their homes; during bad weather and at night, the entire family might work at making nails for their own use and for barter. Thomas Jefferson wrote in a letter: “In our private pursuits it is a great advantage that every honest employment is deemed honorable. I am myself a nail maker.”
I like the preceding lines
Nails were expensive and difficult to obtain in the American colonies, so that abandoned houses were sometimes deliberately burned down to allow recovery of used nails from the ashes. This became such a problem in Virginia that a law was created to stop people from burning their houses when they moved.
Thomas Jefferson made nails for commercial profit in purpose-built workhouses on his estate. Or to be specific, his child slaves made the nails
Threading reel to reel tape.
Reading card files in libraries.
Servicing and repairing many things in the house, but devices were far more easily diagnosed and repairable due to not being computerized. Really the “it’s broke and I gotta fix it” ability across age groups has really dried up. Doesn’t matter if it’s changing a tire on a car, or a kid having to fix a punctured tube on a bike tire to get to their friend’s house. They don’t ride anywhere for that matter. Changing brake pads. Changing the air filter in the home HVAC. People don’t do this stuff anymore.
Being bored.
Reading newspapers, books, magazines, etc. I don’t think people read as much anymore.
Hobbies. I think they’ve kinda died off, at least the physical ones. Model planes, trains, building stuff in your garage, cars, etc. Some of it’s been priced out of range or has gotten too technological for some, like cars, but manually creating something as a pastime has really disappeared.
Remembering a lot of phone numbers in your head.
I’m sure I’ll think of more, but it’s been a while since I was a kid and thought about pre-modern tech society.
Ooh I just changed my air filter for the house the other day!
Maintenance in general does seem to be something lacking in an age of disposable and easily replaceable items. Often times it is less expensive to replace vs repair, which is an upside down paradigm for sustainability…unless the retired item is recycled or repurposed.
Good for you.
DIY filter change? $25 give or take depending on the filter. Service company doing it? $100 for the luxury of them arriving, $30 filter, $150 min labor rate to maybe do a service check, then whatever $ for issues they find.
FWIW think it’s good to have pros check stuff once in a while, they’ll see things I won’t know to check.
Definitely agree with having pros check in on stuff I’m not 100% confident in.
I’m going to have to look up this card index thing.
Reading newspapers, books, magazines, etc. I don’t think people read as much anymore.
Depends, are you excluding reading on a screen? The hard numbers are that people do way, way more in text now, and are better readers and writers as a result.
Not OP, but I believe there is a big difference between reading a book or longform article vs 3 paragraphs in a Fediverse thread. I certainly feel it when I sit down to read longform (but i still often read longform).
…but manually creating something as a pastime has really disappeared.
Or have gone commercial. People are definitely still manually creating, but a lot of it has been made to be sold, either for personal gain or to be able to afford to live.
There were a lot of older ladies sewing when I was growing up. I think nowadays we just throw clothing away and buy new stuff. At least until lately when there was a large middle-class. Typewriter repair was a thing in my town as well.
There is no significant loss in total skill with each newer generation. The paradigm is constantly shifting. Humans have always adapted and learned to manage whatever is readily available to them and how to maintain it. Your parents complain you don’t know their vintage skills. You complain they aren’t learning new skills. You complain younger people don’t know your “necessary” (vintage) skills.
“The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise” - some guy in 1907 summarizing Greek beliefs.
The generation that can navigate whatever it is kids navigate (flipper zero?) can’t modify an OS. The generation that can modify an OS probably can’t tune a carburetor. The generation that can tune a carburetor probably can’t change a horse shoe. Your skills are based on what you have to do every day. As technology removes the need to manage those things, the skill is lost and new skills replace it.
