However, since many tasks are adjacent to each other, you're keeping these tasks at the edge of being alive.
Do you have plants at home? You're 50% there for growing your own food (veggies, at least). Do you mend your clothes (e.g.: sew your buttons back)? You're ~30% there for making your own clothes, given you have access to fabric.
On the essay writing, I can argue that at least half of my communication skills come from writing and reading. I don't write essays anymore, but I write a diary almost daily, and I build upon what I have read or written in the past for academic reasons. What I find more valuable in these exercises is not the ability to communicate with others, but communicate with myself.
Brain has this strange handicap. It thinks that it has a coherent thought, but the moment you try to write or tell about it, what comes out is a mushy, spaghetti which doesn't mean anything. Having the facilities to structure it, and to separate the ore from the dirt, and articulate it clearly so you and everyone can understand it is a very underrated skill.
Funnily, the biggest contributor to my written skills is this place, since good discussion needs a very particular set of skills here, namely clarity, calmness and having structure to your thought.
This is why I'm very skeptical of letting go of writing, and actual pens and paper for progress. We're old creatures evolved slowly, and our evolution has a maximum speed. Acting like this is not true will end in disaster.
Humans, the civilization and the culture we built has so many implicit knowledge coded everywhere, and assuming that we know it all, and can encode in a 80GB weighted graph is a mistake to put it kindly.