Things I take for granted
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How many people reading this know where their favourite foods come from or how they're produced? How many know how to manufacture the clothes they are wearing? I'm not simply talking about putting together a sandwich or sewing one piece of fabric to another of the right shape. Most of us can do that. I'm talking about sourcing the raw materials and preparing them in order to achieve a result that is fit for purpose.
I can say with all honesty that I know very little of the above. I could make a sandwich. I could even make the bread. And I could, with some practice, stitch together something resembling clothing if I could only find somebody with little enough self respect to wear it. But I wouldn't know where to begin in terms of making the raw ingredients for the bread, let alone the filling for the sandwich, whatever that might happen to be. And I'm only vaguely aware of the start and end points of how cotton is made, but I assume there are a whole bunch of steps in between that would take more effort than I'm prepared to put in.
The point is that as individuals we don't need to know all of this. Gone are the days where survival depended on your ability to clothe and feed yourself. We no longer need to know how to bash things over the head in order to get what we want. Or, at least, most of us don't. These days, if we want something we can just go out and buy it, safe in the knowledge that somebody somewhere has already taken care of the hard work.
As humans, we developed crafts in which some excelled over others. We developed a system of trade whereby we would swap something we could do for something someone else could do, thus meaning we didn’t have to do it anymore. Eventually we created money so that, if we had enough, we didn't need to learn any trades at all and could rely on other people learning them. (These days we call it 'management'.)
Unfortunately, not needing to learn new skills sometimes makes us less inclined to do so. I love learning new things. It's one of my biggest passions and motivators. But even I don't have much interest in filling in the gaps in my knowledge that lie between Gossypium hirsutum and the T-shirts in my wardrobes. I'm quite happy to make sandwiches using bread bought in a supermarket and fillings that arrived in my possession wrapped in plastic. Truth be told, I'm not even too worried about the plastic itself or how it got there.
That's just how things are now. I'm eternally grateful, in my own silent, ignorant, money-spending consumer kind of way, to those who do learn those essential skills. Without them, I wouldn’t have the variety of foods that are available to satisfy my very fussy palette, or a wardrobe full of clothes of any colour one might desire, providing one only desires black. And while I still have no intention of learning the secrets behind all the everyday items I use, I will at least endeavour to keep learning something so as not to be completely inept.