What's a basic skill your shocked more adults don't know?

The difference between your and you're

Basics of money.
Like putting away one third of your money every month, keeping a budget, learning when to splurge to maintain self control (budgets not too tight) and learning to live below your means at any cost.
The magic part is the other half of that equation. Money grows in it's own (though slowly) and putting some away for later starts paying for its own pretty soon.
- I highly doubt even half of adults, even in some developed countries, have the spare income to put a third of it away
  
  I agree, but assume everybody spends 30% less. The demand goes down for luxury goods. And things get more affordable. Disposable income is about what you can live without. And although I'm obviously not speaking about the poorest among us, most middle class people spend too much and live in debt because they want to keep up with the Joneses.

Good communication skills. Being able to tell someone else what you mean so they or anyone else could understand. My boss is beyond awful at it makes getting anything done a struggle at times.
- This. Weirdly enough autistic people seem to struggle less here. Perhaps because they tend to be more literal in their choice of words?

Basic humanity/empathy for marginalised groups
- I've started casually consuming history content. Othering is basically the #1 social activity for humans unfortunately.

Cooking your own food. No, it's not hard. No, it's not unaffordable. And no, it won't rob you of all your free time.

Critical thinking skills.
It just astounds me when people who should know what this is and how to practice it, don't.
- I find it weird this isn't a standard part of education yet. I would be ashamed to lack those skills

The difference between your and you're.

Looking up the information online (beyond just googling it in your native language).
i.e. Trying out the results in other search engines, when looking for the information about something in a foreign land, or something the specific nation is very good at; try using the local language (and use the online translators to search it and read it).

Knowing the absolute basics of using a computer
- Eh, it depends. I don't know how to sew, except to fix a hole in my sock. Couldn't make a coat, never needed or wanted to.
  My mother can't use a computer besides checking her emails and finding a movie to watch, which is all she needs and wants to know.
  Now, if it's your job to use one effectively and haven't got a clue? I expect you'd end up in management in no time.
  
  Sounds like your mom does know the basics

Apparently a lot of older people were never taught algebra. I have a lot of math in my life so I find that weird.
A basic skill that I lack is the habit of keeping things clean. I do my cleaning in bursts, which can be counterproductive because my space is messy between those bursts. It's a basic skill, and one that I'm working to improve, but it sure does not come naturally to me!
- Think of everything you do as a circular process. It starts with a clean state. Progresses to using something and making something dirty, and it should end up where you started, so you complete that line by putting away stuff and maintaining the surfaces you used.
  Some processes involve breaks for people, like eating and taking a nap, but then you get up and while making a coffee you complete the circle.
  When you get advanced, these circles start to run in parallel and intermesh and that's fine if you can manage completing all of them regularly.
  For me the hardest part is managing impulses and sticking to the process. It avoids emotions about lengthening the process later on (needing to clean up before being able to make food again).

Knowing how to swim or ride a bike. It's not too common, but when someone tells me they can't, I'm quietly kinda shocked.
- socioeconomics plays a large part here. I learned to swim at the ymca, but schlepping my silly ass to and from swim practice meant parental involvement.
  bikes? learning to ride a bike in the suburbs is natural; learning to ride a bike when you live in an apartment building - hell keeping a bike from getting stolen is difficult when you don't have a garage.
  imho, these are both easy to understand when you view through a larger socioeconomic starting point: we don't all have the same opportunities and resources.
  
  Race also plays a large part of it. In most cases, if your parents know how to swim, you do too. But many black people don’t know how to swim, even if their parents know how. Not because of a lack of transport or means, (though that could certainly play a part) but because their parents didn’t want to get their hair wet to teach them.
  For those who don’t know, ultra textured hair is a very special beast, and takes a lot of specific care to keep it looking nice. And getting it wet tends to be a big sin unless you’re specifically washing it.
  So all the black parents never took their kids to the pool to teach them how to swim. Not because they couldn’t afford it, but because they physically didn’t want to get wet. So swimming knowledge gets broken from one generation to the next. So the black people who know how to swim are typically the ones who go out of their way to learn on their own, or who have non-black friends who taught them.

The difference between "your" and "you're."
- Ur not wrong.
  
  But u r.
- I'm neurodiverse so I spell things wrong sometimes.
  
  Everyone spells things wrong sometimes.

How to reason through solving a problem or fixing something. Not necessarily being successful, but just the process of thinking about possible things to try or steps to take.

critical thinking
- And what better place to show that, if you know what I mean.

Empathy. It shocks me how many "adults" have a toddler-level understanding of their relationship to the world (as in it doesn't revolve around them) and society (as in we have responsibility for each other). So many "adults" sound like screeching toddlers whenever there's a hint of someone else getting something they don't get. It even reaches the level of "I don't like this movie so it shouldn't have been made" as if the very existence of entertainment or education or whatever in a field they themselves don't prefer is a personal affront.
And this isn't even a right-wing thing. The feminist National Action Committee in Canada was turned from a potent and feared political force to a laughingstock by ostensible left-wing women deciding that their concerns over daycare trumped native women's active murders among other intersectional issues.
- Something that bothers me about a lot of people's sense of empathy is that they're only able to employ it by directly relating events to themselves. It's like a stereotypical "How would you feel if this happened to your daughter?" thing, where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it's possible for them to get into.
  I also hear this a lot around disasters, whether they be natural, terrorist attacks, etc. If you're around somebody who has been anywhere near the location of the event, get ready for the "Gosh, that's so awful. I was only there six years ago, it could have been me." Can't you just fucking care about the wellbeing of things that aren't you? Feel bad because a bad thing happened, not by making it about yourself.
  
  I don't see what's wrong with that. That's also empathy, just not everybody follow the same way to feel it.
  
  where people can only extend empathy as far as a situation that it's possible for them to get into.
  I wonder if there is a distinguishing term for this.
  Empathy = The ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes (no matter how different they are from you)
  ? = The “ability” to imagine yourself in a situation that someone else, who’s very similar to you, experienced.
- i wouldnt call empathy a skill
  
  I think they're looking for compassion?
  
  I would.
- God this is true, there's a staggering amount of people that lack it. So much selfishness as well
  
  I lost most of mine during Covid. The amount of selfishness by people during that time has made me want to never be empathetic towards them... and there were A LOT of selfish people.
  
  Selfishness can be trained away, lack of empathy not very much it seems.
  Happily we store all these non-empats in position of power.
  
  It's akin to a skill, after all. Like humor. Having either one does not make someone good or bad. They're just gimmicks in the end.
- I think overall, most people are just too dumb. I mean you could always say that, regardless of how smart the population actually is in absolute terms, simply based on variability. But still, so many things can be traced back to this. Of course, smart people also do really dumb shit, just less often.
  
  There are no smart people. Everybody is stupid (where "stupid" is defined as "prone to maladaptive behaviour and/or belief"), no exceptions. There are just some fields society values more when less stupid than others.

Taking feedback constructively
- To be fair, many people don't know how to give constructive feedback very well either.
  
  Yeah, too many people simply think brutal honesty is the same as constructive criticism. When in reality, they’re just looking for an excuse to be brutal.
  
  True
- How dare you. Well I never. You kids these days. Think that you know everything
  <s>
- Yep and it can be difficult to tell if someone's reacting badly because they're vulnerable or because they're a twat.

Listening to understand, rather than listening to respond.
- Yep and just waiting for their turn to speak
  
  In guilty of this. I usually know what they want to say at word 3 or 4. Waiting it out is exhausting. Not waiting it out is rude. Hard either way, not talking to people, way easier.
- Agreed. The best responses come after one has understood.

very basic sewing repair, like reattaching a button or sewing back down a popped seam
but then again fast fashion makes these skills seem worthless to many people
- Honest question: what is there to learn? You've got a thread, a needle, you put the thread in the needle and then you stab the things that need to fit together with it. The only thing that i was told during such stabbing to a button once was that i should wrap the thread around the button when done, but it hasn't prevented me to attached them so far?
  
  You would be surprised how many people are unable to do that, who are physically capable of doing it.
- Agreed, fast fashion and it's equivalents have pretty much killed off basic repair in general. My great grandmother taught me how to rewire a lamp, and I think I'm the only person in my friend group that can do it. Most people just toss them when they stop working.
  Nana was in her early 20s when the great depression hit, and her influence is probably why I'm so in favor of right-to-repair.
  
  your Nana rules. I can't rewire a lamp myself, but I'm fortunate I have a handful of nerd friends I know could do it for me. I'd bake them some bread (mom's recipe) in return

Cooking & self reflection

Imagining the potential of a prototype.
"So with this prototype I want to explore aspect A"
"I don't like it. I don't want this as a final product."
"Ok. Do you like aspect A? Imagine all other things were finished as you like it."
"No, I don't like this product."
- Same for apps and sites. Having to explain to someone multiple times that I'm not trying to force their users to be bilingual just because there is "lorem ipsum" text on the page is rough.

Math, and I mean basic math: adding, subtracting, multiplication, division. Basic understanding of fractions, basic understanding of percentages.
I'm not amazing at math but I consider this basic and with relatively regular day to day application. I'm not saying people should be able to make these operations without a calculator on the fly, I certainly couldn't in many cases. But I would expect people to know what math you need to apply to, say, calculate a 20% discount. I would expect people to know if, say, two thirds is more or less than three quarters. But no. Nope
- Where I live this skill is normal. I was on vacation to the usa once, and people were amazed I could add two digit numbers at an arcade. I only realized how odd that was in retrospecr
- I'm an engineer by training which includes a lot of higher math training. Also have been running my own company for years. But still learned this basic stuff way later. This is something that should taught in school.
  
  ... you got an engineering degree not knowing basic percentages and fractions?
  ... isn't this taught in schools? I definitely learned it before age 12
- People being bad at math isn't a new thing but it is getting worse now with everyone having a calculator (phone) in their pocket.
  Also. Great time to dust off this old gem.
  
  I'm not sure if having a calculator available makes it worse. The calculator only does the operation. It doesn't reason which operation needs to be done, it just does what you tell it to do. And that's where people fail at, understanding the concept behind the operation.
- I frequently do blatantly inaccurate math just to spitball, and when I say the numbers that I'm computing out loud, people get amazed that I can keep track of so many numbers when I'm only tracking the result of the previous calculation and the operator that I'm about to perform.
  I'm like, dude, if you accounted for the rounding errors, you would realize how fucking wrong I am, but this math is not precision-important, and so I'm just trying to get an idea of the scope of the numbers that I need to address whatever problem I'm working on.
  For instance, if you asked me to spitball how far it is from Los Angeles, California to Atlanta, Georgia, and how long it would take you to drive that, I would assume you would average about 50 miles an hour after breaks and whatnot that you would be able to drive approximately 12 hours a day, which means you could clear 600 miles, and off the top of my head I would guess it's about 3,200 miles between Los Angeles and Atlanta, assuming that you stay on the 40 as much as you can once you get to Amarillo, TX, so I would assume that the average driver would take five days and approximately four hours to drive that distance.
  This is very off the cuff, off the top of my head, I could be 600 miles off on the distance in either directions, I could be 10, 12 miles an hour in drive time off in either direction, and I could be off 4 or 5 hours or not even account for a co-driver on the trip.
  You can do the trip in like 2ish days. I have done the trip in like twoish days.
  But, reality and guesstimation are two separate things, and there's no reason to be amazed by somebody's guesstimation capabilities. It's very basic math that doesn't require any skill greater than your multiplication tables.
  I don't know why more people aren't good at it.

How to cook? Or even follow a recipe. Not like hard stuff either, a simple casserole recipe or cookie recipe. Not even find a good recipe, that's actually very hard online these days what with bullshit generators and stuff. I hand you a recipe.
- With something like cookies there's actually a bit of assumed institutional knowledge, like what "cream together sugar and butter" means. Sometimes the devil is in the details and those details you kind of need to have seen every episode of Good Eats to get.
- I can cook great, I suck at following recipes. Not because I can't follow instruction, but because so many recipes are written full of jargon
- Yes I second this one. Some people can't even hard boil an egg
  
  Makes me remember that old boomer joke "My wife cooks water in the evening so that the next day I just need to warm it up for my tea"

To do very basic home repair and DIY. I keep wondering how people get through life without being able to drill a hole, fix a clogged drain or even change a light bulp. Do they get some sort of service technican for all these things?
- Yep... Some people pay electrician to come and change a lightbulb...
- I'm one of them! Neither parent could do DIY and I've got poor manual skills. Recently I had to ask !dadforaminute@lemmy.world how to put picture hooks up. They kindly and patiently explained it to me 😊
  
  While I understand that there could be a lucrative market here... It warms my heart to know that there are people who would just volunteer their time to help others... Because that's kind of what a dad would do. Just straight up give advice and experience with the thought that they would be helping the future.
  
  I use a bizarre system that eliminates hooks entirely, relying on velcro instead. AND peels off the wall without a scratch when you don't want it any longer.

your shocked
It'd be spelling.
- This isn't a spelling error. This is a grammatical error. "Your" is correctly spelled. It's just the wrong word.
- Haha I'm neurodiverse
  Edit: thus the spelling errors
  
  Are you looking for "dyslectic"?
  
  This isn't reddit. You can edit your post to fix the title here.
  
  And I'm tall.
  
  I went to school with someone dysgraphic. I edited all his papers because he couldn't spell the same word five times in a row with the same spelling. While the profs were aware, we very tightly link mental capacity with linguistic capacity and even with the best of intentions his inability to spell would cause marks to go down.

The ability to use the correct words
- The ability to use the correct words
  "The capacious aptitude for the judicious deployment of linguistically felicitous and semantically apropos verbiage," I think you mean.

Swimming, had to help fish a dude out of the lake because he swam far into the deep end and started panicking when he realized he didn't have the steam to swim back. His only swimming experience was water parks and kiddie pools.
- I was on a paddle board a summer or two back, and noticed someone swimming with their really tall, inflatable kayak that they had been fishing off of. For some reason, they were dragging it through the water in one of our lakes.
  I felt stupid, but I paddled over to them and asked if they were okay, as they were out in the middle of the huge lake.
  He actually said "No, I don't know how to swim, and can't get back into my kayak" which made me ashen-faced, and I helped him onto my paddle board and back into his kayak. Thank fucking God he had a lifejacket on. He was probably about 700 feet offshore and fell overboard much earlier. Had he not had that lifejacket, he might have drowned. He never called for help as he was embarrassed.
- Still haven't figured this one out myself. I don't even have that experience, not for a lack of trying.
- That is ridiculous, on a lake there are barely any waves, you can just turn on your back and float around to catch a breath. Just remember to move from time to time so people don't think you're a corpse.

Why is it called "common" sense, if don't nobody have it anymore..?!
- Why do so many people misconstrue "common sense" for "stuff that feels right or obvious to me personally"
- I think in a modern setting "common sense" refers to easily to understand lessons and concepts, but they still need to be taught. For me, it's common sense to perform proprioceptive rehab on a sprained ankle to restore function after immobilisation, but that's hardly common sense for everyone.
- The phrase common sense originates from the Latin sensus communis and the Ancient Greek koine aisthesis (κοινὴ αἴσθησις). In classical philosophy, particularly in Aristotle's writings, "common sense" referred to an internal faculty that unified the information from the five physical senses, allowing an organism to perceive a coherent reality. This faculty was considered distinct from rational thought but essential for basic perception and judgment.
  That's why. This is the original use. It mutated over time, however:
  Over time, particularly by the 16th century, the meaning shifted toward "ordinary understanding" or "basic intelligence," the kind of practical judgment expected of any rational person.
  And that then further mutated into the current, somewhat contrafactual meaning:
  The phrase came to signify both the shared, basic intellectual capacities of ordinary people and, sometimes, the conventional wisdom or prejudices of the majority.
- Haha ain't that the truth!

Chicken doesn't need to be covered in vegetable oil to be cooked.

Same as most kids don't know. there are a number of things. Money, listening, how/who to gather information from. I'm missing your point when you put adults in your question.

Starting fire with just a couple sticks.
- That I've been shown. But even with a fire bow from materials in the woods I can't. In some places there is the occasional rock that sparks when hit, but I've never used that.
  To be fair I've never taken that too seriously. I didn't think and still think I'll likely never need such a skill
- Of dynamite?

I guess basic home renovation suff. I literally do these kinds of things for a living. In my experience, it’s not so much that people don’t know how to do this stuff - it’s more that they lack the tools, the time, or they’d just rather pay someone to do it properly. I’ve had jobs where it took me only a minute to fix something they could’ve easily done themselves, but honestly, I can’t blame people for not wanting to mess with something they’re unfamiliar with. Most of the time, I’m not any wiser than they are at the start either - but I guess I just have the ability to figure things out on the fly.
- I'm one of then. I had to ask !dadforaminute@lemmy.world how to put pictures up cos I had no clue. They told me about sticky hooks! 😃

How to get to the bottom of a conflict without settling on popular opinion.

Mental arithmetic

How to build a house.
90% of the work of building a house can be done by a semi-competent DIY'er. Learning the basics of framing, roofing, plumbing, electrical, drywall, etc, is not that hard.
- And who will work your job while you do this?
  
  I'd find it handy for home repair, or a fun project. You don't need to build a house to use those skills
  
  Knowing how doesn't imply you actually ever need to do it. It's like knowing how to change the tire on your car.
- Sure, you can probably DIY half your house but then it's going to be shit. I've learned from just maintaining a house that you better get professionals to the essentials. Especially when you expected your house to hold a few decades.
  
  Skill issue, don't build like shit and you won't have shit
  
  Only if you build it like shit. Again, like I said, a semi-competent person can do a not-shit job just fine. It just takes longer than having a pro do it.
- Now make one out of brick