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

[Stu87]

My grandad could fix almost anything mechanical by sound alone, listened to an engine and diagnosed it like a doctor, that specific ear is genuinely disappearing, modern engines do not even make the same honest sounds anymore

[Finley]

The engines not making honest sounds point is real, some of these skills are not dying from neglect, the actual object changed underneath them and made the old competence obsolete rather than abandoned

[Skibidi]

My grandmother darned and mended everything, clothes lasted decades under her care, and I have zero of that skill, cheap replaceable clothing genuinely killed the need for it, that one really is decline not just change

[Cobra]

Navigating without a screen is the one that worries me about myself specifically, my mother could read a landscape and a map together in a way I have simply never had to learn, and I suspect I have lost something real there

[SpikeDudley05]

Counter to the decline framing, we gained the ability to learn almost any skill instantly from a video, that is a new competence our grandparents lacked, we did not become less capable, we became capable differently

[Craig95]

Capable differently is fair but there is a real cost when the different capability is fragile, my map reading grandmother could navigate through a total blackout, my screen navigation dies the second the battery does

[Linda52]

My grandfather remembered dozens of phone numbers and addresses with no device, and I genuinely could not tell you my own partner's number, that specific memory muscle atrophied completely and I do think it is a loss

[DistantSequence]

The atrophy is real but so is the freed up mental space, maybe not memorising numbers let a generation's brains do other things, every capacity we free up gets used for something, the question is whether the trade was worth it

[TeaSpiller]

My gran grew and preserved food from a garden that could have fed us through a genuine crisis, and I would not survive a month without a shop, that gap is not neutral change, it is real fragility we have accepted quietly

[Terry]

The thread splits fairly between genuine loss and honest trade, engines and memory changed shape rather than vanished, but the growing and mending skills look like straightforward decline, both readings earn their place here