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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
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
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