this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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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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[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] Hossenfeffer@feddit.uk 8 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago)

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!

[–] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 11 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] quediuspayu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 1 day ago

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.

[–] xavier666@lemmy.umucat.day 2 points 23 hours ago

What have the Romans ever done for us?

[–] Mirshe@lemmy.world 0 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] UnspecificGravity@piefed.social 1 points 21 hours ago

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.