One of the sudden things that hit me on January 13th was that I was worried I would leave T without a whole load of things that I just knew that she had no idea about. I don’t mean this in a “I’m really clever” way, what I meant was that there’s just those everyday things that you know/do that the others in your life don’t know. And that sums up all of your knowledge accrued over your whole life. One of the things I of course had forgotten about her is one of the things that attracted me to her in the first place – she’s a strong, intelligent and independent woman. Even if I’d “bus person”- ed it, she’d have been OK in the end for the most part. She was fully capable of looking after herself and the kids for a long time and did so to the highest level. She would do so again if circumstances dictated it.
But there was a lot of stuff that was just in my head, with no records at all. Without going into details, I’ve seen the mess this can make for people in the past, and I didn’t want that to happen – and some of this stuff was important on a future life finance way. So I spent much of the first couple of weeks ‘sorting’ things like that out, and didn’t concentrate on anything else, which was a mistake that I think I mentioned on my thoughts on counselling.
Once I was more back on track, we worked together to ensure things were done in a triaged order – which would be different for everyone.
- Accounts
- Bills
- House legal and procedural stuff
- Extension stuff
- What to do in an emergency or bleeding all the radiators etc (for boring extension-related reasons!)
- More general stuff
- Skills and experience
- The list could go on and on…
But as you get further down the list, you have to come to the realisation that a lot will be lost. All those little details will be gone. I’m reminded of Roy Batty’s monologue at the end of Blade Runner:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off (the) shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
T and I have been watching a lot of YT videos together, and a lot have been my sort of choice – about making things and so on. Fortunately we’ve found some channels (particularly on woodworking) which are good watches in their own right, but some are just my self-indulgence.
There’s a common theme about ‘bringing manufacturing back’ to whatever country – often USA, but people say this pretty much everywhere – but it’s just not as simple as ‘build the machines and we’ll be able to make it’. There’s a reason why people had apprenticeships back in the day (and I mean the type that I did). It takes years to come across all those little situations where knowledge and experience are the difference between success and failure. And if you have to go through that from the start, sometimes success (in a complex system) is simply impossible. There are too many places where things will go wrong and mean that whatever is being done/made goes wrong. One of the vidoes was a smarter every day one about building a grille scrubber (which sounds so simple but is in fact really difficult) entirely in the USA, and one of the guys he’d dealt with in a previous video had passed, and all of that knowledge he hadn’t been able to pass on to the next generation is gone – or at best distributed amongst many other people – and unavailable. I can just imagine him seeing a new press tool and thinking ‘that just needs a little rounding here and it’ll work” but you’d never spot it any other way.
Years ago I was watching a programme about making of TV adverts, and there was one (I think for Boddingtons) that was going to be in black and white. And they were talking to the modern cameraman about it, and he said they hired an old lighting guy (who was in his 90s) who used to do Ealing Comedy films, so knew how to light the scenes. The young guy said he thought it was an absolute disaster as everything looked terrible as it was set up. He knew it would look awful and thought they’d have to re-do the whole thing but they went ahead anyway. This was back in the day when it was shot on film, IIRC, which may illustrate why they weren’t sure of the outcome. But the takeaway was that the guy was convinced the old, experienced guy had lost it.
And when the film came back…. it looked amazing. Credit to the younger guy to admitting it for the story, and it really hit home to me then (I think I was in my early 20s) that there’s a lot that’s being lost – even now in a world where everything kind of can be documented in so much depth and openly so for everyone to read – the kind of utopian Internet that I have always believed in of free knowledge. But it’s still too fine-grained to be stored or organised in a searchable way (compared to the amazing way our brains work), and I can see how some ‘impractical intellects’ have become obsessed with doing this but no-one seems to have cracked it.
I don’t even think there is an answer to it at this point, and possibly ever!
Whenever I’ve had time to work with Sennen on a motorbike or car (and indeed when T and I changed the oil and filter on the camper van), knowledge has passed in this way. Obviously you start out with the big stuff (what way to turn a fastener, etc!), but it’s all the little tips that you pick up on the way, knowing the limits of what tools will do, when to go ‘next level’ (such as we needed to use the welder to get a seized shaft out of his suspension on his motorbike) and so on. Each time was a little transfer of knowledge and it felt good. Even if it is maybe forgotten, but so many times things like this aren’t…. There’s a little ‘spidey sense’ in your head that reminds you of a situation that was the same or similar that means you approach it differently than you would have just going in cold. I watched literally hundreds of YT videos before building the extension and learned so much from real skilled professionals sharing tips that it made a huge difference to the outcome. One was dead simple – about sorting the wood you make a flat roof from so that the bends in the wood don’t create puddles – but it’s something you’d only know if you know. And I wouldn’t have given it a second thought without that video. As it was, 10 minutes’ work probably saved me hours of trying to correct this (or not even being aware of it, more likely, and not fixing it). Countless examples of this meant that the extension is much better built than it would have been had I not watched all those videos and been the lucky recipient of these skilled trades’ sage advice.
And I think this is the same as being a good parent in many ways (if I have any idea about that at all!). You try to pass on the good stuff to your kids from your experience, but people are people and often want to try it out anyway, even if it ends up being a mess, it’s their mess, not yours!
That, on a larger scale, is one of the things that has always been a bit sad to me. Not loss of my knowledge per se, but that each generation has to rediscover so much stuff – partly because it’s just human nature to decide to do it yourself rather than take someone else’s experience, and partly because once you get into all those subtleties I can’t think of any way of accessing them appropriately.
Funnily enough, this is one area where AI (or more precisely using Large Language Models) does look to have some promise, but the problem is that they hallucinate some of the answers…. and that means you end up having to double-check everything you’re told. But for a lot of less technical stuff they are incredible tools for finding information – or rather, have potential to be once we can be sure that the answers they give are correct, and that if they don’t know they admit it (that’s not the situation at the moment).
It’s probably why books and libraries have always been such cherished things to me – because without them and learning, you really would be starting from scratch. And I remember (during my lonely 20s) doing a lot of thinking while riding my motorbike and coming up with starting ideas for thoughts and philosophy that clearly thousands before me had done so in much more depth, thought and detail, and now realising that we really can ‘stand on the shoulders of giants’ because of books and knowledge transfer. It’ll never be complete, but it should also not be forgotten.
Without going too political, I think there’s too much forgetting of the past happening in the world in the moment, and we’re seeing some potentially catastrophic results in the pipeline. Things are presented in the Clarkson-esque “How hard can it be?” way, when it turns out that nearly everything is complex and doesn’t have simple yes/no answers. Everything is a trade-off in multiple dimensions, and there are very few (if any) perfect answers. If the world was as simple as it’s being presented by many populist groups, it would be drastically different and easier to fix than is being sold. But that’s me rambling off in another direction.
But on the upside, writing this has meant I’m a lot more at peace with what will happen, and that is probably the best thing to come out of this particular bit of writing.
Thanks for reading, if you have made it this far!
