Doing Less of Everything the Body Does
Melanie Challenger's list in Aeon is made of verbs: sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, attending. Her claim is that we are doing less of each, moment by moment — a slow subtraction rather than a single loss.
Put that way, deskilling stops sounding like a workplace problem and starts sounding like a description of a life. A capacity you stop practising doesn't vanish; what goes is the practice. Under a list like that, competence becomes something closer to a habit than a possession, and habits are only as good as their last outing.
Whether this reads as deprivation or relief is the fight worth having. A list that long suggests Challenger leans toward the first.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
If a capacity fades through disuse, the same logic suggests it can be restored through use. That makes the list a warning rather than a verdict.
Not everything on that list is a skill in need of rescue. Doing less attending, doing less choosing, can read as relief rather than deficit.
Then the question shifts to who chose. Doing less because you decided to is a different proposition from doing less because nothing requires the effort.