Jerry Pournelle, a polymath, used to say that a dark age was not when people forgot how to do a thing, but when they forgot that anyone was ever able to do it. I don't know where he got it from, if anywhere.
At a previous job just a few years ago, my team were mostly young and junior engineers. I remember showing them some photos of the new electronics workbench I'd built, because I was proud of it. I was having trouble getting this across - it eventually became clear that they all thought what I meant by "I built this" was "I assembled this".
They were flabbergasted when I said that no, I bought wood and sheetgoods and stain and varnish and designed it on a notepad and made it exactly what I wanted it to be. And they didn't ask me "why" - they asked me "how".
I sometimes get the impression that (in the West, at least) we are already living in the dark ages. Many young people are unaware that you can actually create things, and that it used to be common to do so. To them, it seems that civilization is something you pull out of a sea-can from China.
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