xkcd "Work": https://xkcd.com/1741/
"Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me."
"Sometimes I get overwhelmed thinking about the amount of work that went into the ordinary objects around me."
He also sounds unbearable.
There's an idea in psychology called the illusion of explanitory depth. It's the idea that everyone has much more confidence in their understanding of how things work, even the most mundane and apparantly simple things, than is warranted. In turn we tend to hugely underestimate the difficulty, complexity and skill in jobs we have never done.
The world is absolutely full of utterly prosaic objects that are far more sophisticated that we imagine, either in their function and design or in their manufacture.
Most people overestimate how well they would cope in some post-apocalyptic world. But I think even many people who regard themselves as prepared, underestimate how much skill and sheer effort is involved in making really simple things like rope. To do more than just scrape by you would need to reconstruct a society of specialists, it won't be the rugged individualists.
Most things are pretty simply and someone with a basic understanding could get them mostly right or at least right enough to work. The complexity comes from the many layers of refinement over the years. No, your clay molded toilet won't flush like a modern one but if you understand the basics of how a toilet works it'll probably flush.
Inversely, those folks that think about how things work tend to be fairly overconfident in their ability to recreate/repair/innovate. In reality there are often fine details that you miss.
Of course people can learn anything. It's that we tend to not realise that we don't know this stuff, and so we underestimate the difficulty/complexity of them. This often leads to people actually looking down dismissively on other people's jobs, as they assume they must be simple or easy, because they have never done them. You get endless political commentry on how people doing certain jobs don't deserve to be paid well because what they do appears "simple". Train drivers are a classic example. It's a job that is a lot harder and more involved than it appears at first.
For a while I worked in the rail industry. That was full of things that were way more complex and involved than I had ever realised. Things that seemed simple on the surface had decades of refinement and subtlety to them born of experience.
Your example is a great one. The principals of the flushing toilet with a siphon flush, ballcock and an S-bend outflow are not complex, but a lot of people have no idea what pressing a flush down actually does to get the water into the bowl, how it refills or what the S-bend is actually for (it's more than just the smell, sewer gas is explosive). It's the reason that a lot of people don't tackle more DIY jobs, they suddenly realise they don't understand it. But it's also why YouTube is so great, because these things are all learnable.
In the event of a societal collapse, I sometimes think that preserving all the instructional YouTube videos would be our best hope for rebuilding :D