I’ve had several triggers for this thought recently. One was an NPR show where they were talking with an Alaskan Eskimo who was sad about the youth not sitting quietly in the dark eating blubber and that they were instead using computers and cellphones and embracing the future. Another was my recent link to the 8 simple rules for the home kitchen. A last was a crazy woman walking her dog through our city neighborhood… barefoot and trying to think how she justifies that.

It comes down to this: I don’t understand people who mournfully look back to the past and regret the loss of traditions or skills which aren’t needed in the modern world.

Is it really that sad that we’ve lost the ability to whittle a bow and arrow out of deer horn, oak and horse intestines? (I don’t actually think we’ve lost that skill… it’s just an example). I don’t think so.

Lots of things we as a society no longer do because they sucked. We don’t run around in wool clothes anymore because… they itched. Cotton is way better.

It’s irrational. Nostalgia is counterproductive to societal progress and evolution.

While some skills may still be useful to some people we each need to seriously think about where we’re spending our time. The ability to hunt, gather food, whip up a fire with sticks, dry leaves and no matches might be useful to a park ranger who is actually in danger of being lost in the woods… but it’s not to 99% + of the world population at this point. In reality there are thousands of skills we can spend our time learning (or not). Instead, wouldn’t it actually be much more relevant to modern survival if you learn how to do something like say… navigate the internet properly… which could save you from real threats like identity theft as opposed to trying to recreate how to properly boil maize the way the pueblo indians used to in case of the extremely high probability of Y2K societal collapse? Plus not to mention that you’ll probably better be able to fit into society if you don’t act like a nut who’s worried about the world collapsing or spending all your time trying to “uncover” skills that we as a people lost because they were tedious and lame.

Of course not everything new is fantastic. Lots of things fail before we find the few things that really are better.