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Comment by zkmon | Hacker News Reader

It's not isolated phenomenon.If we look at the larger scale of, say, 100 years, a lot of things are rapidly disappearing. It's actually some sort of extinction that is underway, but you don't feel it on a smaller scale of time. Similar to how Romans wouldn't have been aware of the Fall of Roman empire while it was happening, because it was too slow to notice.

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Can you give some examples of things rapidly disappearing?

The average person's ability to acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.

The average person ability to make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.

Free range childhood.

Average person getting dirt under their fingernails.

Being in sync with sunlight cycle.

Stargazing at night.

These are off the top of my head (I'm not op).

I don’t think in 1926 more than 50% of global 15-20 year olds could:

“acquire food from nature (farm, hunt, gather) and cook it for themselves.”

“make and fix their own tools. Build and fix their shelter.”

(Culturally, those tasks often specialize by vocation, gender etc.)

They absolutely could. A quarter of Americans’ primary job was agriculture in the 1920s. While job specialization was certainly a thing that didn’t mean people outsourced all of these tasks the way people do today.

That’s different from solo gather and cook and repair which is the artificially inflated bar being set here. I know people from multiple parts of the world who grew up on family working farms - specializing very real (esp. gender based)

I'm saying that the number of people doing these things are disappearing relative to the past. Seems to me like you are the one making up and moving bars around.

You said 50%, you said 15-20, you are speaking in absolute terms.

I'm pointing at trends.

Do you deny the trends?

I found that you’re basically arguing against the wall at this level of threading so I would just give it up.

I don't know about "globally" but I would be surprised if 50% of American males couldn't do this in 1926. These were skills taught to most young males and the country was far more rural. It was far less universal among females though some did learn these skills.

While unstructured, this kind of standard life knowledge was intentionally and systematically passed down to most boys in every community I lived even when in elementary school. It was expected that you knew how to do these things and men would go out of their way to teach you if you didn't.

Kids did fishing, trapping, hunting, building out camp sites, etc for fun when I was growing up and it was generally encouraged. Learned helplessness wasn't really a thing.

This started to die out decades ago. Most zoomers I know didn't have anything like this experience.

Learnt how to balance and ride a cycle on my own when I was a kid, and I used to 'run away from home' for 12 hours with other kids, I learnt how to swim after drowning, twice, ate whatever was around, green almonds from trees, grapes from vineyards, but raw corn was painful, I would not advise trying. We tried to hunt with arrows and sometimes used gun powder in a primitive red-loading rifle, but we sucked at it. we got chased by dogs in farms we raided and chased by an armed man who claimed we caused his wife's abortion while we were playing football in the street. Another armed man chased us brandishing his gun after we attacked him with stones after we caught him staring at our neighbor's daughter while she was on the balcony. This was in 1969 to 1973 before we moved to an apartment building and all that ended. Now I joke telling my family that I wish for once the police would call me for something my son has done, but no luck with that:) . Here some photos I wish you could recognize that dude on my shirt https://imgur.com/a/JCFMgap

The dude on your shirt is Mork from the show Mork & Mindy, played by Robin Williams.

Thank you, I was bullied all the time because of it.

I think OP is talking about Shifting Baseline Syndrome[0].

> A shifting baseline (also known as a sliding baseline) is a type of change to how a system is measured, usually against previous reference points (baselines), which themselves may represent significant changes from an even earlier state of the system that fails to be considered or remembered.

[0]: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shifting_baseline.

[1]: Earth.org article that reads nicer: https://earth.org/shifting-baseline-syndrome/

Being able to see stars in the night sky

Sure, here's one!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47815127

Reply on news.ycombinator.com