My daughter was bewildered. “You mean, put the car key in the car door?” she asked her dad, trying to picture how that would work, exactly.
Her dad was highlighting car essentials for winter weather, and he was winding up to talk about lock de-icer, the magic to unfreezing your car door locks. Except that this child has never once driven a car where you stick a key in the door. Essential driving knowledge has changed.
All essential knowledge has changed.
The last time we moved, my husband and I popped into the bank in our new state to open accounts, carrying our folders with birth certificates, social security cards and photo IDs. We knew all the documents we needed. No one would be sending us back home to try again another day.
When the young staffer asked how he could help, we explained. His face looked pained. “Um, do you know how to use a computer?” he asked gently. “We do all of that online now.”
No need for all those documents, in all those folders.
I was so proud to be getting it right – as it worked fifteen years ago.
A lot of people are fifteen years behind right now. Or, ahem, football guy, fifty years behind.
Each one of us knows so much less than we used to. Technology leaps forward, of course, and so do people. In a way I couldn’t have imagined as a teenager, people can express their true identities, use their real names, or change them, and hold onto a life they choose. Not everywhere, of course: we all have work to do.
I have a lot less knowledge, and get to ask many, many more questions. I work to hit the balance of being respectful while not presuming that anyone is here to educate me. In my anxiety to be hospitable, I keep quiet when I should speak up, and speak up when I should shut up. I fear being the person droning on about things that were true fifteen years ago. Or fifty.
In former days, we assumed that older people knew more because they had lived longer. Now, as the world changes, we actually know less.
Still, it’s fun to be in the mix of people who have never used a phone both, been inside a bank, or seen an answering machine. Or, put a key into a car.
What do you know that’s still true? What do you need to know more about?
The book I’ve been loving: Supercommunicators by Charles Duhigg. When he talks about the book on podcasts, he tellls the same story over and over, which made me think the book would be boring. Instead, it’s a great primer on aligning our conversations, and having better ones.
Old knowledge may become useful again someday. My son works at a hospital dealing with a cyberattack. The radiology department has had to revert to some "old school" techniques -- reading images on the machine rather than from a file, typing reports instead of dictating. He is exasperated but I wonder if the old-timers are giggling gleefully together in the break room.
So much automotive knowledge from a long past career. CAD software, Ford's Worldwide Engineering Release System. Teleconference calls, my pager! (pre cell phone days) something called a "digital fountain" that moved data of huge 3d models of vehicle parts around the world.