This week I’ve written about Upskilling and Deskilling — one hopeful, one a warning.

Today’s daily sits beneath both: Skill Erosion. It’s the gradual loss of expertise, critical thinking, and foundational ability that happens when we stop practicing, or let a tool do the practicing for us.

It starts small. Cognitive offloading, researchers call it. Letting GPS do the navigating, letting AI do the writing or the analyzing, so the muscle of active problem-solving gets less use.

I’ve felt a version of this myself: stop speaking a language you once spoke fluently, and it fades. Not gone, but rusty. Erosion doesn’t announce itself. It just slowly takes back what you stop exercising.

There’s also something researchers call productive struggle — the friction of doing a task the hard, manual way, which is exactly where deep intuition and pattern recognition get built. Skip the struggle and the effort you put in, and you skip the building and the big part of learning. This is part of why I handwrite every post before I type it. It’s not nostalgia. It’s insisting on the creative struggle and genuine work that keeps the skill alive and me proud of my work and words.

A sharper danger lurks beneath the boredom and alienation I wrote about yesterday. When a core skill erodes, so does your ability to judge whether the machine’s output is even any good. You can’t catch an AI’s mistake if your own judgment has gone soft. That’s not just an emotional cost. That’s a competence problem that will catch up and compound.

A mentorship gap is also forming. Junior people are turning to AI instead of the senior person down the hall, which breaks the old, reliable chain of nuanced judgment passed hand to hand, person to person, over years of experience. That chain doesn’t rebuild itself once it’s broken.

Skill erosion can happen to anyone. No one is immune, Sager or not. But this is exactly where Vintageing earns its keep. Vintageing is not passive aging. It’s the daily, deliberate practice of staying engaged, staying sharp, and choosing the harder, more human way when the easier way is right there, one button away. It is, in a very real sense, a chosen countermeasure to erosion. Not because Sagers never lose a step, but because they keep showing up to practice anyway.

So maybe the real question, across all three of these pieces, is this:

Are we upskilling on purpose, or eroding by default?

The answer isn’t found once. It’s chosen daily in the beautiful and purposeful struggle we keep, the practice we protect, and the judgment we refuse to hand over.

Thanks – Michael (he, him)

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This matters too – Upskilling.

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