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In a recent thread in the AskReddit community, the user u/Aryan_Anushiravan decided to ask: "People born before 2000, what trivial skill do you possess that others don't use anymore?" Apparently, the question touched a nerve with netizens, and in just a couple of days, the thread gained around 11K upvotes with over 17K comments, which, by today's standards, can well be considered a viral status.
Of course, there were many humorous comments in the thread, but overall, it gives an incredibly large-scale picture - how, in just a quarter of a century, an absolutely huge number of skills, habits, and ways were mercilessly sent to the dustbin of history.
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No, in the past, humanity also got rid of outdated skills from time to time - for example, in the 20th century, the profession of a chimney sweep practically lost the importance that it had a century before. The demand for stokers, having reached its peak about a hundred years ago, gradually faded away as well, and there are actually more such examples. But never before has progress moved so rapidly.
#8
I spent my teen years in the nineties, and I still have the muscle memory of rewinding an audio cassette with a pencil (in my prime, I had a collection of almost a thousand cassettes)...
I can do math in my head (a skill honed, in particular, by the need to calculate file sizes limited by the capacity of a floppy disk), and I still have pretty good handwriting, although I increasingly catch myself thinking that these skills are completely out of demand today.
Well, simply judge for yourself - who needs audio cassettes when even the iPod, which until recently ruled the music market, is becoming a half-forgotten device nowadays? When modern kids and teenagers use voice input to their fullest, and handwriting has become something archaic, like chiseling out clay tablets of Babylon?
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On the other hand, aren't modern people losing something important by not using the skills that older generations considered absolutely necessary? After all, almost all new things and phenomena are ultimately aimed at making people's lives easier, making them think less, and making fewer decisions themselves.
As a result, today's school teachers are literally sounding the alarm, telling incredible stories about high schoolers who cannot count, read, and write, or have very poor knowledge of these basic skills. So before laughing at the outdated habits and skills of millennials and X-Gens, let's first think—don't these habits give our brains much-needed training?
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In any case, it seems that this collection of facts and tales will be really interesting to representatives of any generation—from baby boomers to Gen Alpha (for the former, it will be pretty much nostalgic, for the latter, probably just funny).
By the way, if you, like me, were born before 2000, then perhaps you could also write here about a skill you possess that is unique to today and completely commonplace in the past. After all, why not?
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