BREAKING: Young People More Useless Than Ever

Not Feeling The News Today? Let's Trashtalk Some Younguns

Traditional 'taking-care-of-yourself' skills are being lost by the younger generation. They can't cook, they can't mend their own clothes, they can't do basic maintenance on much of anything they own. They pay people to do that.

BASIC "female" skills are becoming endangered with fewer young women able to iron a shirt, cook a roast chicken or hem a skirt.

Just as more modern men are unable to complete traditional male tasks, new research shows Generation Y women can't do the chores their mothers and grandmothers did daily, reported The Courier-Mail.

Only 51 per cent of women aged under 30 can cook a roast compared with 82 per cent of baby boomers.

Affluence obviates the need for domestic skills, as the article notes. Though I'd argue that even the more affluent among us a generation ago were not as helpless with their hands as nearly any 20-year old is today.

I'd postulate that with the wide availability of cheap and reasonably durable clothing (easily obtained even by the poorest in society), it has become counterproductive to spend time and effort mending. I guess you could call that affluence, again, but on a societal scale.

On the other hand, the young have grown up in a new world and have other, brand-new and marvelous skill sets.

Maybe some of you can fill us in on what they are, because I'm drawing a blank here.

posted by Laura. at 07:25 PM

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