Ask HN: What are good life skills for people to learn?

For instance, saying “excuse me” before you barge in front of someone to get something off the shelf at a shop. I’m American, so that is obvious. I live in Estonia, and here you either 1) stand awkwardly and wait for them to move because you don’t want to interact with them or 2) just shove in front of them and grab what you want and leave.

The first time I took my then girlfriend to the UK she did that and the woman she dove in front of looked at me like “WTF?”. I apologized and then had to explain to my girlfriend that that isn’t acceptable in English-based countries. She was genuinely confused and asked how she should do it instead. Even though she speaks English fluently, there is only so much you learn from Cartoon Network (I kid you not, many have learned English that way) and YouTube. She wasn’t trying to be rude, she just genuinely had no idea it was coming off that way.

The same also applies to standing in lines, getting on and off public transit, and many other things.

Edit: oh, and table manners. My $diety, the table manners... I don’t expect you to be able to set a formal place setting (though I can), but we aren’t animals, you should know how to use a napkin, not to double dip your chips, etc.

Enough knowledge in psychology and neuroscience such that you can have a decent understanding of how the human mind works (and ways in which it fails imperceptibly). Time spent in psychedelic and spiritual realms seem to be quite practically useful for this type of learning.

Systems thinking - gain an understanding of the presence and importance of unseen systems, and the unseen complexity and causal relationships contained within. For example, we live in a system (that itself is composed of numerous subsystems), and each of us is a system (our mind, itself composed of two distinct parts, the conscious and subconscious, each consisting of numerous subsystems). Such things are very easy to forget in real time, but even if remembered, our perception of the state and behavior of these systems is extremely inconsistent (sometimes even backwards) with how they actually are.

Realize that outside of the hard sciences, we are rarely dealing with facts, but rather coarse approximations, and that this is often completely not realized (to put it mildly). It seems this can be decently learned from an abstract perspective, but the degree to which this abstract knowledge can be drawn upon in real time seems extremely inconsistent.

(Meta) In general, people's minds (and broad Western culture) often seem to find these sorts of ideas instinctually repulsive, so exercise disciplined skepticism with those who dissuade you from study.

Changing a tire? Yes, you should know that (or, honestly, be able to intuit it, it’s not exactly complex). Being able to change the oil, a fan belt, or coolant? Yeah, I know I could if I had to, but with the hazardous waste and all it’s far from worth it for me to try to.