How many of you know how to start a fire without a matches or a lighter ?

Or how many of you remember your wife’s or husband’s phone number?

My wife doesn’t remember mine.. or even hers..

How many of you still write ?

Hello and welcome to my blog. Today I will tell you that your children are learning a useless skill, that is to write. Because they will not use it when they grow up. And on top of that their children will not even learn to write.

In next 30 years, humans will stop writing. Writing is a skill we learned but Why do we even learn new skills ? By natural instinct, Humans learn for 2 reasons – Survival and pleasure.

1. skills for survival are, making tools, run faster, climb trees, remember directions, make hut, cook food..

these skills humans learnt in last 100,000 years.

2. skills for pleasure are drawing, sculpting, singing, dancing, juggling a ball etc.. And since humans always lived in community, very soon they learned that they can use their skill to do a job for someone else and in return get the other person to a job for them. like hunting and giving food to a someone who builds a spear for you to hunt. In last 5000 years people also started using pleasure skills , for full time work like dancing, singing and sculpting. In Renaissance period, in Europe the highest paid jobs were of sculptors, painters and other artists.

In moderns times, several new skills human learned – Teaching, factory worker skills , computer skills, sports, skating, skiing, riding, driving..

While humans acquire new skills with turn of every century, no body noticed that we keep forgetting skills that we learned with so much effort. And the one and only culprit who makes us forget is – The Technology.

Popular belief say that Ramayana and Geeta are 5000 years old and some beliefs say that Valmiki wrote Ramayana around 2500 years ago. So before that probably it was memorized and passed on to generations after generations. This great ability of humans to remember and memorize was completely annihilated by the invention of printing. Of course writing was invented long before printing but it was not practical to write copies of books and distribute to everyone and hence people used to remember, stories, songs, poems and printing press made a necessity to remember long texts, redundant.

In 1 million years humans learned to control fire, and only in last 10,000 years they learned how to light a fire. Invention of matches just 200 years ago made humans forget how to light a fire. The same happened with Sculpting, Knitting, weaving, and stitching, AND The same thing is happening to Hand Writing.

Since the advancement of computers in our homes and offices, a good size of a population stops writing by hand completely as soon as they finish writing their final university exams. Unless you are in a profession of teaching, there is no profession where you need to write using a pen and paper. Journalists record and type later, authors write on a laptop, programmers type, lawyers, doctors, bank manager, everyone who has a desk job types in a computer instead of writing in a notebook. and this proves that actually the whole generation is wasting time learning to write and and finishing their homework by writing in a notebook.

What is the biggest strength of Humans.. it is not writing, or painting or cooking.. it is our brain. Our ability to perceive a problem and ability to find solutions. And all our skills are just tools to do what our brain wants to do. and we gave some tasks to machines now. we dont wash clothes with hands because we have machines to do that. In the same way we don’t write because we have keyboards to put our thoughts down on a paper.

And with advancement in speech recognition, it is even more easy to write without writing. With digital signature and block chain technology, you may not even sign your property documents in future.

But there are great use and advantages of writing also.. so it is not entirely useless..

Advantages of writing #1 – Retention and creativity : Hand writing is slow and that why it allows lot of time for creativity. It also great for retention, if you are a student and preparing for exams, it is extremely useful to write..

2. Hand motor skills, tool holding, drawing skills, surgeons hold the knife like a pen. The biggest advantage for humans to learn to write is hand motor skills. learn to hold a pen is the basic skill for learning to paint, draw sketches, cut vegetables, use a screw driver.. or even perform a surgery.. remember, surgeons hold a knife like a pen.

3. easy to express or take notes, if you have a combination of text and drawings., It is super easy to just do it on paper.. for my TOGAF exam, I studied online, took an online test, but made hand written notes because it gives me the flexibility to draw.

But the strong evidence is that people are writing lesser and lesser and by some estimates human will stop writing in next 30 years. In distant future, it is possible that all skills become optional.. when human mind connects to the computer, you can just wish and a skilled machine can do that for you. So you can be an architect without learning to hold a pencil, or a musician without learning to play any instrument. Well what more humans will forget, only time will tell.. but you do not forget to share tis blog with your friends, leave a comment and subscribe to the news letter, because lots of exciting blogs will be published on this website every week.