Nobody at the Table Knew How to Fix Anything

I had dinner with seven people last month — all of them professionals, all of them capable, most of them in their late thirties or forties. The boiler in the house had broken that afternoon. Someone asked if anyone knew how to bleed a radiator.

Nobody did.

This is not a complaint about the people. I didn't know either. But the absence of it went unremarked — there wasn't embarrassment, just a kind of collective shrug before someone found a YouTube video, then called someone. The gap felt normal.

I've been thinking about what it would have meant for a previous generation to sit in a room and admit, collectively and without concern, that none of them could fix the heating in a house. I don't think it would have felt normal.

The capability still exists somewhere. It was a phone call away. But it had migrated out of the room, out of the people, into a network of services that made it unnecessary to carry personally. And nobody mourned it.

I'm not sure mourning it is the right response. But I think noticing it is.