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?

  • UnspecificGravity@piefed.social
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    6 hours ago

    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.

    • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
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      5 hours ago

      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
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        1 hour 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.

    • noobdoomguy8658@feddit.org
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      2 hours ago

      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