Atrophy

The only thing worse than watching your skills gradually erode, is being blindsided by the loss of a skill you once took for granted.

I could smell the clutch beginning to burn. I could feel the cold sweat on my neck. The cars behind were honking impatiently. My mind raced through various scenarios. Would the impact from hitting the car in front, even at a crawling speed, be enough to hurt the kids in my car? Would the collision be enough to get that car to start moving and hit the car in front of it? I'd bought collision insurance for the rental, but did that cover damage to another vehicle? What about 11 other vehicles as I started a chain reaction that single-handedly cleared out all the cars parked on the hill? How do Italians react to having their cars wrecked?

I believe I'm a decent driver. Not exceptional. But definitely above average. I got my driver's licenses under two very different systems. First in 2010, from the occasionally-functional chaos of the Nigerian Federal Road Safety Corps, and then later in 2019 in the hyper-regulated German traffic system with its detailed Straßenverkehrs-Ordnung (StVO) and over 1000 traffic signs. One of the best things about moving from Lagos to Hamburg has been not needing a car for my daily commute. The public transportation system in Hamburg is definitely decent, but true freedom for me means being able to ride my bike for most of my transportation needs. I first learnt to drive in Ibadan, the "City of Seven Hills" in my parent's car with manual transmission. My driving classes and test in Hamburg were all with manual transmission. I passed my German driving test on the first sitting. I'd been driving for 9 years before that, so it was really about being able to internalise enough of the StVO and have the situational awareness to properly apply them during the practical test.

I was therefore surprised to find myself failing at properly handling a manual car during a recent trip in Italy. To be fair to myself, it wasn't the most straightforward situation. I had successfully navigated driving the 80km mountainous route from the airport to our accommodation. Of course, there were the occasional moments when the engine revved too hard because it wasn't on the right gear, but overall there was no engine stalling and it was a smooth enough experience. Two days later, we had taken a day trip to Castelsardo, one of the famed I Borghi più belli d'Italia ("The most beautiful villages of Italy"). The Doria Castle in Castelsardo is situated at the highest point of the town overlooking the town and the sea.

We wanted to experience the view of the city from the top of the hill, and with two kids in the car, decided to drive up to the closest possible parking. Unfortunately for me, this parking option was a single-car slot on the side of a narrow one-way road with a 30-degree decline facing the bottom of the hill. We had two options.

1. Drive down the hill and around town, find a less menacing spot where it was flatter at the bottom of the hill, ignore the restless children in the car for a few more minutes, then manoeuvre these children back up the steep hill.
2. Reverse uphill and parallel park.

Option 2 seemed like the obvious choice until we got stuck. I could blame it on the fact that we were in a rental car that I wasn't completely familiar with. Or that the 110hp engine of the Seat Ateca probably wasn't powerful enough to handle reversing on slow speeds up a steep incline. Whatever the reason was, we were stuck. I had started the parking process, the car was mostly in the parking spot. In this part of Italy, "mostly in" means about 30% of the car was still on the road and cars behind didn't have enough space to drive by. The city wall on the side of the hill meant there wasn't much wiggle room there either. The honking started. Another idiot tourist who doesn't know how to drive has gotten stuck. As I tried to reverse the car uphill for the final stretch, it just kept rolling forward. I couldn't manage to keep the car going uphill in reverse, because the instant I switched from brake to accelerator, either the engine stalled, or the car rolled forward. It got to the point that I couldn't afford for it to roll down even a bit more because we were about a meter away from hitting the car in front. At this point we got out of the car and asked someone from the cars behind to help. The first person ignored us. Probably another tourist masking their own inability with irritation. The next person was a local. He hopped out of his car, bounced down the hill with the confidence of someone who does this every other day and properly parked the car in two swift moves. We said a big thank you and he waved us off and went about his day. The ease with which he did it made everything clear. It wasn't the car, or the hill. It was me. I didn't have the skills I thought I did. Perhaps 12 years ago, when regularly driving on the hills of Ibadan, I would have parked without a second thought and moved on. Indeed, I do remember parking under similar conditions. But after 10 years of driving automatic cars almost exclusively, with the exception of the manual car for my driving test in flat Hamburg, I no longer had the skills to manage a manual car within tight constraints.

This wasn't the first time I was confronted with the atrophy of skills I'd taken for granted.

• Being totally gassed after 60seconds of soccer at a beach in Lagos during a work Christmas event in 2014 made me realise that I wasn't nearly as fit as I'd been in university less than three years prior when I'd run 5km under 30mins without any training. This realisation made me start playing Basketball. I don't like running and this was the simplest way to get regular cardio.
• A month after moving to Hamburg, it once took me 30minutes to walk the 300metres (5minutes) from my apartment to the train station. I had run out of data and so couldn't use Google Maps to navigate. I was hit with the realisation that I really wasn't as observant of my environment as I used to be. Since then I've tried to rely on devices less for navigation. Yes, I've sometimes taken much longer than expected to get to places. But at least I no longer feel helpless when there's no Internet connection, and can feel more present moving through town. Do I even truly live here if I always need a navigation app to get from point A to B.

The main reason I started thinking about atrophy again wasn't my driving situation. As a proud cyclist, I don't put much stock in my driving skills.

I do however, pride myself in being a good software creator. When interviewing candidates for software development jobs, I'm increasingly surprised at the proportion of candidates with several years of experience at top tech companies who can't explain concepts I consider fundamental such as the meaning of Linux file permissions, or how to interact with files using the CLI. This is not so much atrophy at an individual level, but seems more like an industry-wide trend. However, with the maturity and proliferation of platforms, tools and trends such as hyperscalers, Kubernetes, and GitOps, is it actually truly necessary for software developers to know these things to do their jobs effectively?

Battling atrophy too hard leads to obsolescence. If we cling desperately to our current skills and ideas, we don't allow newer and better techniques and opinions to take their place.

I'm trying to incorporate GenAI tools into an increasing number of work tasks. Using coding assistants feels natural. And I recently gave a presentation where all but one of the images was AI-Generated. That's great because I'm not a good artist. The minuscule visual artistry skills I have left can wither and die for all I care. What I'm more concerned about is losing the skills that come from the process of trying. Is it really worth it to substitute the mental resilience that's built from taking hours to create something visually appealing, and then realising that your artistic friend does something better in minutes? Is having earphones with instant translations really worth sacrificing the curiosity and perseverance of sitting through learning a language, making mistakes, mispronouncing and being misunderstood, but still keeping at it?

I'm not worried about the skills we'll lose. I'm more concerned about losing the skills we needed to acquire the skills we'll lose.