Making a good trade means giving up one thing to get something better. Life skills are no different, and for the most part we’ve made some solid trades. A lot of them have been thanks to new technology. Not as many of us can saddle a horse, do mental math, or hunt our own food anymore, but we’ve learned to drive cars, make spreadsheets, and navigate food-delivery apps. 

We gave up skills that were crucial back then, and replaced them with equally valuable skills needed to navigate the world today. The problem, though, is that we aren’t making very good trades anymore. 

Let’s take the basic skill of organization as an example.

From Pleistocene hunters to modern city dwellers, keeping important stuff organized has always been a survival skill. That might include anything from a prized stone tool to your car keys. Lose the tool (or the car keys) and you can’t skin an animal or drive to work. You’ve compromised your ability to survive.

Now, though, we’re giving up that skill to devices. Your smartphone can tell you where you left your laptop, and vice versa. Your devices can show you precisely on a map where your connected people are. Physical trackers can be attached to pets, keys, and wallets. We no longer need the skill of remembering where we left our stuff, even in our own living room.

But if we’ve offloaded such a vital skill, what have we replaced it with? What mental or physical ability have we gained in return? 

Maybe it’s the ability to keep our hundreds of apps organized on our phones. 

Unfortunately, experience in both tech and personal life tells me otherwise. Watching people swipe through multiple screens of disorganized apps is a common occurrence. I’d be rich if I had a nickel for every time someone looked confused and said “How did that get there?,” when they spotted an app they didn’t remember downloading.

Fair enough when it comes to free apps. But maybe having to pay for things is an incentive to stay organized? 

Based on the growing number of subscription-management apps, it seems not. Instead of knowing which subscriptions you pay for each month, you can now use an app to do it for you, reminding you of how much you pay and offering to cancel things.

It appears that we’ve lost the vital skill of organizing important stuff, and replaced it with—nothing. 

Organization is just one example. There’s navigation (no need to even read digital maps anymore; our voice assistants read them to us) and driving (a skill in decline with the rise of parking assist, lane alerts, and self-driving cars). There’s also the rudimentary skill of communication. In a OnePoll survey of 2,000 American millennials, 68% of them admit they “actively avoid talking face to face if they can.” 

We know how to push buttons and give voice commands, but the actual knowing and doing—the skills themselves—we’re happy to give up.

Our shiny new tech brings incredible benefits, there’s no doubt of that.

But don’t forget to consider what skills you’re losing and what skills you might gain. Because it’s always worth knowing if you’ve made a good trade.

Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash