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?
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Reading analog clocks
i read that as reloading analog clocks and i think that fits too.
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.
Social Skills. Navigation. Do it yourself. Touching Grass.
If you consider them to be inversely proportional to social disorder, social skills would be at a nadir in 1975. But, there’s other ways to look at it, of course.
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.
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.
Mending clothing, basic auto repair and woodworking.
Uhh… not that I’m any good at it, but tying knots.
Bowline is a very cool and useful knot
I only know some basic knots.
What I do know are some shoelace knots, like this fastest shoe knot. (this website in general has a lot of interesting information on shoelacing)I don’t know why I spent a good minute looking at that, studying exactly how to do it. My shoes don’t have shoelaces…
Here’s how to tie another one:
Using a rotary phone. looking up a book in a card catalog. The ability to solve your own problems.
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.
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.
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.
Threading reel to reel tape.
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?
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
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
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.
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).
That hasn’t been my experience. I guess I get more immersed in something longer, but basically, so what? Either will help with spelling and grammar, either can give new insight.
There’s plenty of longform garbage, too. A helpful Lemmy post can definitely be worth more than a Rex Murphy op-ed or the entirety of Das Kapital.
But what are they reading? Being a better reader or writer is only as good as the information exchanged. Is it memes? Clips? How about per capita?
Yeah, it’s possible people are reading more crap now. Although there was definitely less-than-highbrow literature around then, as well.
…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.
Physical hobbies are alive and well, but kinda niche when compared to things like video games or tv/movies. I got into model building a couple years ago, and there are plenty of folks who are into it. I would argue the hobby is bigger than it’s ever been. Same goes for other things like r/c and tabletop gaming.
Also, don’t forget about 3d printing, which would definitely fit as a physical hobby. It also augments the previously mentioned hobbies, as well as many more.
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.
It may be a state thing. My girls didn’t learn it.
Good judgement
Ah yes, the 1970’s, a famously peaceful and rational time.
I kinda wonder if people are thinking back further than 50 years here.
What would you consider good judgement? Not that I disagree with you.
In some way, the current environment feels like it forces you to practice your judgement more so than was necessary in the past.But I suppose many don’t really bother.
Navigating a paper map.
You want to drive to a suburb of a big city. You have an address. The internet doesn’t exist.
How do you get there? Well. You use a map. Almost every glove box would have a local and state map, if not a full map book like a Thomas brothers.
Even more scarce is the ability to navigate a city by simply understanding it’s road system. Give me an address in my home city (a labyrinthine nightmare to visitors) and I can just drive there without looking at a map. It’s practically a party trick now that I can tell where people live by just hearing their address. Which sounds absurd until you realize they no one ever needs to do that anymore.
I was so confused by this comment until I remembered that US-american streets are planned and numbered. Because while I grew up in a village in the 90s, I wouldn’t be able to tell you where the “Primrosestreet” or the “Blackbird street” is unless I had friends who lived there.
My dad gave me advice when I started driving in the city, as the town we lived in was NE of the big city; streets run North/South higher numbers going West, avenues run East/West higher numbers going North. If you ever get lost, drive to low streets and high aves, you’ll be on the right track home. It was great advice that served me well, until I visited another big city and got lost, as this city had streets run East/West and aves run North/South haha.
Edit: I hate when cities name streets after things, like this subdivision is named after birds, but not even alphabetically, this one is the same but named after trees, etc. I can find 100 1st street from anywhere without a map. I have no clue where 100 titmouse way is.
You should become a cabbie in London. They all have to memorise 320 routes, 25,000 streets and 20,000 places of interest, e.g. hotels, stations, tourist attractions and so on. It’s called The Knowledge. There’s some evidence that mastering The Knowledge actually alters the structure of the brain!
Road networks in most cities in my country are like someone just dropped a pot of spaghetti. The oldest urban areas here are at most 150 years old too, so it’s not like we can blame the Romans.
Me living in a city with Roman walls:
Are you saying I can blame the Romans for not knowing an address? Cool.Actually, it’s a rather small city. It’s hard to get lost when you can easily walk from one end to the other.
What have the Romans ever done for us?
I used to do this when I delivered pizza.bMy phone wasn’t playing well with the GPS because I had put a custom ROM on it that happened to be too much for the thing, plus aging, but the ROM was too good in every other aspect. So I just studied the map on the same computer we clicked through orders on, remembered my route, and in a couple of weeks I didn’t even need to look at the map before going around our zone.
Still helps me navigate cities to this day, even now that I don’t drive at all.
Although living in a post-Soviet country helps with city/road design, making it rather predictable in ways lol
This only works in cities with naming schema that work that way. For my city, if I wanted to go to my old college, I’d drive to Columbia Parkway and have to take Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard all the way in, or divert through downtown to Victory Parkway otherwise. Some places in the city are named logically or you know where they are, but outside of downtown, you abandon the 5th/6th/7th sort of scheme in many cities in America that weren’t initially Planned Cities.
Now, you can do this in a handful of American cities (Indianapolis, for instance), but not most of them.
You can still learn where the streets are. Seattle is one of the worst planned cities in America and you can still navigate it by route if you’ve spent twenty years learning it.
Actually a much better way was to use a street directory if you know your way around the town even a bit.
Better even, and how we actually did it was giving instructions. “200m after the large tree by the field, drive on for about 400m, there’s 2 junctions before and mines the third one.”
But I also know orienteering ofc as a Finn
“You wanna go down Three Oak lane, I forget what its ‘proper’ name is, but there used to be a farm there called Three Oak Farm, so that’s what we all call the lane round here. 'Course the farm’s gone. And so have the oaks. Anyway, go along there until you get to the field where the unexploded bomb was found back in '68, and turn right. Then left past the field where the cows got sick last year. If you reach shagger’s hill, you’ve gone too far. Now there’s a ford down that way, so you can’t miss it. Except, I suppose, in this weather since it hasn’t rained in a month and the ford’s probably dried up. Most important thing though, you don’t want to start from here.”
Swede here, how would using a street directory help you navigate without a map?
Sure, I know that at least here in Stockholm and it’s suburbs that when a new area is being developed, they name the streets after a similar theme.
But knowing that Sommarvägen in Täby is located within the district of Hägernäs doesn’t get you very far.
Ugh I hate those new suburbs with themed street names. They are always a maze and I get turned around in them. My mate Martin used to live in one of those where all of the streets were some variation of grass. We would be in the car and ask amongst ourselves: “Where does Martin live again? What was the street? Wasn’t it grass something or other?”. Only to get to that suburb and get really confused as all of those streets were named grass something and then we really couldn’t remember.
But back then before GPS was a common thing and before we had cellphones, we had a sort of vibe navigation system. Getting to the correct city was easy, even if you didn’t know where it was, there would always be signs. But then when we got near our destination, you’d sorta drive in a direction that felt right. You’d be amazed how often we just found the right place like that. Only rarely did we have to check our navigation book tucked under the seat or fold out a big map on the dash. Never did we need to ask for directions, that simply wasn’t done.
You look up a street name. That entry tells you which street it begins from. If you don’t know that, then you look up one further. And repeat until you get to such a main road you’d know it even after looking at a map.
So basically you’d look up the street and then browse back and after you’d have a sort of gps like instructions. “main road until you see X street, then turn there, then drive until you see Y road” etc.
I had several in the car I drove, for all the nearby cities/towns. Many in same covers. So it’d cover the main city and outlying towns. Never had to use a map. (Although again, I can if needed.)
I don’t think I have ever even seen a street directory like that, only a street register showing the placement on a map.
I hadn’t either before driving a taxi. (pre-gps)
Actually a much better way was to use a street directory if you know your way around the town even a bit.
You generally only had a street directory of your OWN town, outside of specific professional settings.
I wonder if it took quite a bit longer for people to reach their destination. Because not everyone would be as good at reading maps (compared to simply following gps instructions) Maybe that made it more common for people to arrive at different times. or plan longer trips because the driving would take up a bigger part of it.
Also, when driving alone, I can’t imagine holding your map. So you would still have to stop from time to time for long trips. And actually memorize the big lines of how to get to your destination.
Going along with reading a map most people don’t know how roads and exits are numbered. It’s not a random jumble. This makes reading a map and just knowing what direction you’re traveling in general much easier. This is for the US.
Interstates
1 or 2 Digits: Main routes. North-South routes have odd numbers, increasing from west to east (e.g., I-5 to I-95). East-West routes have even numbers, increasing from south to north (e.g., I-10 to I-90).
3 Digits (Even First Number): A loop or beltway that connects to the main interstate at both ends.
3 Digits (Odd First Number): A spur route that connects to the main interstate at only one end.
Exit numbers
They mirror the mile markers which show up on maps. Numbers increase from south to north or west to east. So you could basically make a ‘cheat sheet’ of your exit numbers. Then while driving you know how far till your next exit.
I’ve seen this not be true on occasion but it should be mostly true. If the exit sign is on the right of the road sign then the exit is to the right. If it’s on the left then it exits to the left.
All knowledge that I feel got lost to time for the most part. They should teach it in drivers ed but I don’t think they do.
I wonder if it took quite a bit longer for people to reach their destination. Because not everyone would be as good at reading maps (compared to simply following gps instructions) Maybe that made it more common for people to arrive at different times. or plan longer trips because the driving would take up a bigger part of it.
Oh it absolutely did. You would regularly have to stop (often after a turn or if you felt like you missed one) and reconsult the map. You just accounted for that additional time. Longer trips are often less of an issue, because its usually, you get to a big main highway and its cruise most of the rest of the way.
And plenty of times, you might get lost/ not be able to find yourself on the map. You’d have to pull over and ask for help/ directions. You might write the directions down on a piece of paper, but that doesn’t do you much good if you missed a turn and didn’t know it.
As someone who travelled for work before and after smartphones, absolutely. You couldn’t just open Google Maps, search a business and go there, the problem wasn’t going city to city, but finding a specific place in or outside a city. If you got a request to go to X business either you already knew how to get there, or it would take some planning.
Nowadays my company can receive a request from a customer in another country, and in 1 hour they can plan the trip, reserve the rental car, book a plane, book an hotel for the night. That just wasn’t possible in the past.
Depends on the area and how familiar it is and how hostile it is to navigation. I can beat the Google maps time 9 out if 10 times in Seattle because Google sends you through some seriously dumb intersections.
In Minneapolis, Google maps almost always tells me to leave the parking lot from work, go down the road, and turn left onto a highway during rush hour. No lights.
The way I actually go is to turn 1 block “early” and wait at the stoplight.
Sure, in theory it would be faster to take Google’s way if there’s no traffic, but again – this is when I’m leaving work!
The main maps I used for driving (back in the day, UK, 1986) were ‘books’ rather than large fold out maps. At local level, an A to Z. At national level, an AA road map, this has the format of a small newspaper, however in thicker paper.
I still have a London A to Z!
I had a few big atlases in my car. One for my city, one for my state, and if I went somewhere else on vacation or for business, I’d get an atlas for that area as well. After a while you have a library of them in a box in the trunk.
Driving and flipping through an atlas was the pre-GPS version of texting and driving.
I still carry a state map in my truck
That reminds me that I never moved the map from old car to the
newcurrent one.
I was so obsessed with NYC subway maps lol (circa 2010)
When I was a kid, I used to just draw my interpretation of the subway routes + streets and like make my own “map”
