Let's check the internet to see what Today's Youth have ruined. Has to be something, right? There should be a story like "Lumber Mills Close as Millennials Reject Toothpicks," so older people can muse about the bygone joys of shoving sharp sticks in your gums.
Ah! The internet, as always, delivers:
Schools are abandoning analog clocks for digital displays because kids can't tell the time.
Seems credible, right? They're just dull-eyed morons who can barely make out the funny dog pictures on their phones because of all the drool. "How me wipe shiny thing? Me use sleeve. Now me ask phone what is time."
I didn't believe it for a second. Today's teens grew up in schools that had clocks on the wall over the door, and they focused on the particulars of those hands like short-term convicts study the calendar on the wall.
Nonetheless, I clicked on the link. The source turned out to be a BBC report, where one school — one! — was considering replacing analog clocks with digital versions because students found it easier to time themselves for exams. Analog clocks have their charm, but they don't tell the time as much as they describe it.
Stories like these reassure people who want to believe the future will be passed to soft, trembling hands unseasoned by the hardships we older folk knew, such as the knob falling off the TV because you'd stripped it changing channels too fast. Then we had to change channels with a pliers!
Things that adults consider "skills" are often just habits formed by limitations. Remember cassettes? At some point they'd seize up and barf a yard of fragile tape into your player. You'd carefully extract it from the machinery like someone trying to reel in a minnow, then rewind the cassette with a pencil.
