The skill your parents or grandparents had that seems to be disappearing with their generation

[Pilot]

A thread about competencies that feel like they are quietly leaving the world along with the people who held them. Tell us about a skill your parents or grandparents had, often without making a fuss about it, that you suspect nobody in your own generation is really carrying forward

These are rarely dramatic skills, they tend to be the patient unglamorous ones, mending rather than replacing, growing rather than buying, remembering a hundred phone numbers, navigating without a screen, fixing an engine by ear, the kind of competence built from necessity rather than hobby

The uncomfortable question underneath is whether these skills are genuinely disappearing or simply changing shape, whether we have traded them for different competencies that our grandparents would have found equally baffling, because every generation loses something and gains something and it is easy to romanticise only the losing

So name the skill, whether you have made any attempt to learn it yourself, and the honest verdict on whether its disappearance is a real loss or just change dressed up as decline, because both readings are defensible and this thread wants the argument as much as the nostalgia