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?
Apparently recognizing and handling fascists.
1975 is a weird place for that, actually. During and right after WWII motivations for fighting it were mixed. Obviously most white Southerners shipping off to Europe weren’t anti-racist. Obviously Einstein was. The sanitised, mythologised version that people think back to today really got going in the 80’s.
I remember last rememberance day in Canada, our public broadcaster did a live interview with a veteran. He was an actor involved in recruiting, and just casually mentioned it was a blackface act.
Reading analog clocks
I grew up reading analog clocks and it only clicked in the last year what top (the hour) and bottom (half hour) of the hour meant.
i read that as reloading analog clocks and i think that fits too.
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
I’ve tried to read 19 century cursive journals and other historical documents. It’s impossible, and I’m old enough to have learned it at school.
There’s a reason engineers and technical disciplines used block/print letters.
Swoopies. ❤️
At this point it’s actually kind of useful as a mild coded writing that excludes idiots.
My cursive is still excellent
Navigation. You used to remember the way to all these places. Now it’s just on the phone.
Worst fear is phone dying while driving.
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.
Mending clothing, basic auto repair and woodworking.
Want to say general automotive competency. As in you had to deal with carburetors on cold days so you had to adjust intake, spray starting fluid into it, know about oil pressure and warming it up, etc. Some people are barely able to conceptualize putting gas into the thing now.
Knowing the prices of typical appliances and such. Example, modern The Price is Right compared to the 80s and before. 50 years ago, people were more likely to know the prices for a multitude of reasons, one being there were more home owners in those generations who might be looking at replacements or upgrades. Now, home ownership is less and I couldn’t begin to tell you the price of a washing machine being a renter.
Also, there were like 3 washing machines on sale. Now you have 50/manufacturer.
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.
Skill most people had:
- Sewing, at least basic sewing. Tailors were expensive, and if you just needed to shorten a pant leg, or fix a hole, you just sewed it. Nowadays mending clothes is almost pointless, given they’re basically made to get holes in them immediately.
- Speaking quickly to avoid collect call fees. People would call home from a hospital phone, which would charge the receiver’s bill if they accepted the call. The phone would ask for your name, and you’d say your message quickly, which lead to your parents at home getting a call from “Baby’s a healthy boy” and then hanging up.
Difference: The whole world doesn’t smell like cigarette smoke anymore. Even when I was a kid in the early 00s, it still smelled of cigarettes basically everywhere.
So y’know. We can’t sew a patch on, or speed rap to avoid collect call fees, but at least drunk driving is illegal, and we have seatbelts
State your name:
Bob, the Adababyeetza boy.
Cursive writing
Still taught everywhere in Europe.
Fun fact: taking notes by hand helps you learn better than typing them.
I use a graphical tablet (wacom) to write my notes. If i write my notes, i remember them much better.
I would type my notes in class because it’s faster, then rewrite them by hand to study off of. except by the time I finished rewriting them, I usually wouldn’t need to study off them any more
They stopped teaching it here in the US, which makes me wonder what people will use for a signature.
My daughter is learning it in public school.
My son is learning it in 1st grade at his school.
Not entirely, my son still had to have lessons on it in elementary school for some reason.
Because it’s better to take notes by hand, and you need cursive for that. Bonus: your writing looks like that of an adult. Bonus 2: you can read other people’s writing (mostly).
I’ve been able to take plenty of notes by hand without cursive. It’s a preference, not a prerequisite.
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.”
Thomas Jefferson made nails for commercial profit in purpose-built workhouses on his estate. Or to be specific, his child slaves made the nails
Ah ha, that one I did not know. I guess slavery is also Americana, though a whole lot less quaint than the thought of industrious households making their own nails
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.
Writing thank you cards and letters.
People should definitely do this more often. Makes it so much nicer to receive an actual physical card from someone.
Postcrossing also still exists, nice to send some postcards to random people around the world.
I still write thank you cards. People really like getting them. In my mind, it’s worth the [small] investment of my time and effort to show my appreciation for something.
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.
The slide rule thing is real. Some of those guys didn’t move to calculators when they came out because they could use them faster than typing.
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.
TIL!
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…
Oh wow, thanks for the reply and TIL!!!
Using a rotary phone. looking up a book in a card catalog. The ability to solve your own problems.
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.
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.
People got more practice solving their own problems, anyway. Education to use for that was unambiguously lower, though, and there was plenty of people just not solving problems.
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.
