Millennials lack basic survival skills ...

Interesting read at: Millennials lack basic survival skills compared to older generations. Being a member of one of those older generations (boomer) I wondered how many here would agree. I know that many here make a point of introducing their off-spring and others to camping and relevant skill-sets, but how much of that training is otherwise useful in daily life?

I was raised on a small farm and worked on much larger farms; if you didn't know how to do something, members of the greatest generation or their elders would bring you up to speed in short order. My father was skilled in carpentry, welding, plumbing, wiring a house and he taught knot tying and splicing skills to my cub scout pack; his job involved none of that. The only thing he didn't let me do was welding, although he did turn me loose with his cutting torch once, that was fun. I learned map reading on my own, seemed fairly self explanatory. After I joined the Navy I learned what I had missed and then I learned celestial navigation. But all that was also back when television sets had tubes so things have changed.

i too have observed that millennials lack the abilities to do even menial skills. some can't change a light bulb or drive a nail. they figure on paying others to do these lowly degrading tasks. i hope they can all afford it. very sad way of living.

On the other hand, they do have skills. My millennial is still hangin' round the old homestead and she will be missed dearly, because she is the acting IT officer.

Needed and relevant skills change with the generations. I can't make a decent buggy whip and my mule packing skills are minimal (although I did do some of that back in '57). None of us can fashion an arrowhead from chert very well, either...There are folks around who can do all of these things, but they are rare, exotic proficiencies these days.

Change a light bulb?? Obsolete!!! Don't you have LED's?

Somehow I think they will survive just fine....

My son lives in an older house, and I make a point to include him in all repairs (not that I'm very good at that myself). There are a LOT of repairs that he's getting to learn. He's at least "normal" when it comes to doing tasks. My daughter, on the other hand, has surpassed me. She's really good at figuring things out. She also likes to learn the traditional ways of doing things. The other day she was "rendering fat". I have no idea what that means, or why you'd want to do it. She grinds her own wheat and cooks everything from scratch. Makes lots of her own clothing (sewing, knitting, crocheting, etc.)

As far as survival in the wilderness, my daughter would do OK I think, but I'd be praying for my son. He's not really the outdoors type, so just hasn't been exposed to things like starting fires, etc. The daughter ... she's always out climbing or hiking or SCUBA'ing. She loves the outdoors and handles herself well there. I don't think this is really a generational thing. I think it's just where their interests lie that makes the difference.

I guess my kids are millennials. Ages 27 and 25. I don't know the year-of-birth brackets for the different generations. I think I'm on the tail end of the boomers myself (born in the mid 50's).

In my experience, when a generation or age group (usually the younger) lacks some skill, knowledge or motivation, it is because of how they have been taught. There are now few social incentives which make it desirable to learn such things. It is up to us to teach them.

Society changes, and skills that were essential to one generation may not be for the next. People will adapt to their environment and situation regardless of age. They just need to see a need for it, to be motivated to do it.

It was always a pet peeve of mine that older and more experienced people blamed younger (and yes, I was usually in that younger group) for not knowing something, and yet that older generation never took the time to try to teach it. It was very prevalent in the military, and I was in hot water on many occasions for criticizing those older ones for not showing the essential leadership and teaching them.

In all of my time I have always been proud of the willingness and ability of most service members to deal with the situations that they face.

The Daily Express is a joke newspaper that simply makes stuff up. Our media are far worse than yours in the US. If it's from an unnamed source; the source doesn't exist.

A glance at teenagers trainers will tell you they can tie a knot.
qjs

Every generation says the same about the next generation. As I was growing up, my parents said the same about my generation and my grandparents said the same about my parents. And now, I hear it from my generation down to next. I think it can be traced all the way back to the caveman days when Uggag and Orkk lamented that their sons could not light a campfire unless they had rock and flint.

IN all seriousness, Hikermor summed it up best. "Needed and relevant skills change with the generation."

What you or you parents and grandparents learned 50-60 or more years ago, much of is not relevant nor safe today. Also many of those old timey skills and knowledge have proven to be downright dangerous and have brought about massive changes in not only building or electrical codes to medical diagnostics and treatment to automotive safety design changes to survival skills to name a few.

I suspect that the numbers are either made up or "tuned" by cherry picking.



The survival skills are a nice medium for the core skills.
The most important points for daily life are a method of learning things and the experience that learning can be fun. With that foundation most required skills can be aquired.
That´s really important as schools tend to take the fun out of learning.

Well times change, so does required skills. Don't know how to do something; these days you can just google how to do it or watch youtube for tutorials.

More complicated stuff, well plenty of free websites like eDX, courseca, futurelearn, etc with universities giving courses.

Knowing where to find and learn a skill is also a skill. And millinia's are doing that pretty well.

Pratical skills like map reading or fishing. Well for most things just grabbing your smartphone get you from a to b pretty quickly. (not in the wilderness, but how many young people do actually go to the outdoors?).

Were you a Quatermaster like I am?

No, I learned cel-nav but never actually used it, so I lost the skill and am in process of relearning. Now though I have some rather nice software to crunch the numbers. Lots of different programs available.

We used it every 4 hrs when in the Carribbean Sea along with 1 Loran-C line (33,000's) broadcast from Raymondville, Tx.

CelNav is definitely a use it or lose it type of skill. I laid my last celnav fix in 1999.

It's definitely a perishable skill, but as long as the basic principles don't change (math & celestial geometry), it's always a good fall-back. In this day of possible EMP events, the US Naval Academy reintroduced celestial navigation after having eliminated it from the curriculum in the 90's iirc.

I use a (plastic) Davis Instruments Mark 3 Sextant in the backyard to shoot sun and moon using a small dish of water to function as an artificial horizon. It's good practice.

That's a good practice! Don't neglect the problem solving steps. That's what I've forgotten.

Crunching the numbers has always been the hard part. Taking a sighting is relatively straightforward if you have a horizon. Apps available can pull the almanac data and crunch numbers. There are way too many ways to screw that up without constant practice. I've got apps or .exe's on a number of devices -- iOS, Android and PC. They all work, the math is very mature.

I'm learning CelNav too (a bit stalled at the moment, but need to get back into it).

I don't see the utility of using apps. Seems to me that the point of CelNav these days is as a backup when everything goes to hell. Meaning that your device with the app on it will be a paperweight. GPS will be gone. Atomic clocks will be gone. So you need to me able to do the math manually. And you need a long term almanac to look up the data.

Sure, have an app to crunch the numbers while the app's host device still works, but know how to do the math manually for when the device fails. But if you're going to be depending on an app, why not just depend on GPS in the first place and forget about learning CelNav altogether? GPS is more accurate, much quicker, and far easier than CelNav.

The one thing I haven't figured out, is how to you have a long term accurate watch/timepiece that doesn't depend on outside technology and batteries? How do you verify it's accuracy and reset the time when appropriate? If you know your precise location you could use that to reset the time on your watch by working the numbers backwards. But if you don't know where you are to a precise degree, and you don't have a trustworthy time reference ... that's where I'm lost in what to do.

You would have to invest in a certified chronometer that is either an automatic or manual wind. Those type of watches are COSC-certified (COSC is Contrôle Officiel Suisse des Chronomètres, the Official Swiss Chronometer Testing Institute). There are many brands that send a few of their models through the testing.

My $.02.

Yeah, while small type errors are significant to GPS, how much time error is significant to cel-nav?

As I understand navigating port-to-port, 5 minutes (of arc) accuracy is acceptable. What would that translate to in time? For those who haven't seen it: Longitude (the movie)

I've been reading about Lewis and Clark and then about John C. Fremont and recall something like they reset their watches using something obscure like - observing when the moons of Saturn or Jupiter (not sure which) disappeared around the planet. THAT time would not be subject to uncertainty in your own position (much).

Kind of astonishing what they accomplished with what little they had.

My celestial nav class in NROTC was reducing some given sightings as we were far inland and the instructors said we couldn't get a proper horizon to learn the sextant (that or they just figured it wasn't worth the trouble)

Once in the fleet, we had to confirm the sextant was still onboard - annually. (submarines)

note: we are now doing sextant training onboard.

I well remember the annual audits!

Why would they poll on the sheepshank? I know how to tie it, but consider it more of a fun trick than survival knot. That question alone makes me question this survey. Now if they'd polled on the bowline or even a figure 8 I'd give them a smidge more credit.

I caught the first two hours of Longitude last night.
Fascinating movie. I will finish it tonight.

For the longitude about 4 seconds translate into a minute of arc due to the earth´s rotation. So 5 minutes of arc would translate into 20 seconds. Errors in the measuring of the elevation go on top of this.
Depending on the vessel 5 minutes of arc may the all accuracy you get with an accurate timepiece.
The calculation for cel-nav takes the known deviation of the timepiece into account. That´s why certified timepieces do not only have a maximum acceptable deviation per day but also for different orientations.

We would use our shortwave radio to receive the time tick from Boulder everyday at 1200 and then note the chronometer error.

They may be certified to some maximum error, but you still need to test them to find out what the actual error of your particular watch is (I'm calling it a "watch" here for simplicity, "chronometer" would be more technically correct).

In order to test your watch, you need a known time source, which would be missing after a grand disaster. So hopefully you tested and documented your watches error rate BEFORE the disaster. But even if you had a good watch, with a previously tested and documented error rate, you could only use that to adjust your calculations for so long. Eventually you would want to reset your watch to the known time standard again. But the known time standard is still unavailable, due to the disaster. A good watch would certainly serve you better than an el-cheapo non-certified one. But it would only serve you for so long, not indefinitely.

This is the gist of my concern in labeling CelNav "a backup for when everything has gone to heck". That may be true, as long as "everything" does not include a good time standard to reset your watch to. CelNav would be good for a while, but you would eventually need a known time standard, or a known location to reset your watch from. You would also need an almanac that contains data for a very long time. Or be a math whiz in spherical trigonometry (which most people have never even heard of) to calculate everything from scratch. The current "Long Term Almanac" goes to year 2050. Enough to cover my lifetime, but not my kids.

Long Term Almanac

While the dearth of life skills is the proverbial Elephant in the Room for the millennials (born 1981-2001), the article itself isn't much better then clickbait. There's no link to the survey, or anything representing a complete list of the questions.

As for the Sheepshank knot. That's an odd knot to test on. I've never actually used it, preferring the dog shank (pouch knot) or alpine butterfly loop. You'd be better served by testing the workhorse knots (clove hitch, square knot, figure 8 family, etc)

****************


The time standard would be a concern for a full TEOTWAWKI/PAW scenario. For that, you would need a sundial or some other pre-tech time keeping device to certify to, and the aforementioned math wiz (recall that the first celestial navigation tables were published in 1767, so it's far from impossible to work out the tables by hand).

But, for the general "Where the bleep am I" situation, it's not a bad skill to have. A relatively accurate watch, compass (you should have these when traveling anyway), star chart ($25), and inclinometer will let you know which direction to start rowing

I have a copy of the "Long Term Almanac". It's not a large book -- 10" x 7" and 1/4" thin.

Please! WWV is located in Fort Collins Colorado.
Please don't confuse it with that other strange town....

W and V used to be the first morse code letters radio kids would learn because WWV would ID in morse.

Lewis and Clark and Fremont had to do without WWV.

You're correct, I had forgotten....

I still remember the WWV phone number from setting my watch to it for years and years. Still works!

(303)-499-7111

A little strange, since Ft. Collins is not in the 303 area code. It's in 970.

When I was a kid we could get a time hack from the phone company -- TI4-8900 (rotary phone). No area code (if you want long distance, call the operator).

It was a simple time, at 10 yo I could buy ammo for my .22LR Winchester Mod 52.

Phone numbers are good. . Here is hoping the cell phones work after the massive EMP event. . .


Of course, none of my pesky short wave radio's will work, nor will the WWV transmitter!

Well, Darn. . . Where is that Harrison H4?