by I was standing in my kitchen the other day with a measuring cup in one hand, staring at a recipe, and realized I had no idea how many tablespoons are in a quarter cup. I knew it once. I must have. But somewhere along the way, I stopped holding that information in my head because I never needed to. Google was always there.
That moment sent me down a quiet rabbit hole. What else used to live in my head that doesn’t anymore?
Phone numbers, for starters. I used to know a dozen of them by heart — my childhood home, my best friend’s house, the pizza place down the street. Now I know exactly three: my own, and that’s mostly because I type it into forms. The rest live in my contacts list, a digital crutch I never asked for but would feel naked without.
Maps are the obvious one. There was a skill to reading a fold-out road map in a moving car, orienting it to the direction you were traveling, tracing a route with your finger while someone yelled “Are we there yet?” from the back seat. I was never great at it. But I got by. Now I can’t remember the last time I navigated anywhere without a blue dot telling me exactly where to go and a calm voice telling me exactly when to turn.
What strikes me is not that these things changed — of course they changed, technology changes everything — but how completely the old skills evaporated. Nobody taught me to stop memorizing phone numbers. It just happened, one less number at a time, until the skill was gone and I didn’t notice it leave.
Waiting is the one that hits different. I remember waiting as a default state of being. Waiting for photos to develop. Waiting for a song to buffer. Waiting for a letter. Waiting for the TV guide to scroll through all the channels so you could see what was on at 8 PM. Waiting was woven into the fabric of everyday life, and we accepted it because there was no alternative.
Now three seconds of buffering feels like an insult. A page that takes two seconds to load might as well be down. We didn’t just gain speed — we lost the patience that used to come standard.
I’m not making a case for going back. I like having a map in my pocket. I like not needing to remember whether my dentist’s number starts with 555 or 554. But there’s something worth noticing in this quiet trade: we traded knowing for access, and access is fast and light until the signal drops.
I wonder what we’re currently outsourcing that will feel strange to have lost, twenty years from now. What skill are we not practicing today that someone will write a nostalgic essay about in 2046?
— Teganna