There is a stubborn myth that the 1960s and 1970s were simply a festival of excess and nostalgia. That tells only part of the story. The era taught a quieter, more stubborn lesson about being fully present. This is not vintage romanticising. This is about how whole communities learned to reduce the tyranny of the future and the past and simply attend to what was at hand. In this piece I want to push past the postcards and listen for the practical hum beneath them. I will be opinionated. I will be messy. And I will insist that some of the ways people lived in those decades still offer sharper tools for presence than many contemporary apps and trends.
There was loss and also an insistence on the immediate
The 60s and 70s held plenty of loud failures. Political betrayals. Crises of confidence. But alongside that noise sat a different strain a daily insistence that small ordinary moments matter. People cooked together at odd hours. They fixed radios and records because the act of repair forced attention. They learned songs by ear and sat for hours in rooms that did not mask the world with curated screens. Presence in that sense was not a doctrine. It was a domestic habit.
Not nostalgia as an argument but presence as practice
We often imagine presence as a tidy practice like a ritual you check off. The 60s and 70s show it to be embedded unpredictably in daily life. A kitchen table became an altar of attention. A hand stitched a coat while a child read beside it. No app measured these acts. The absence of measurement helped them breathe. Presence was messy and patchy and therefore honest.
The cultural fractures that forced attention
When institutions frayed people stopped outsourcing meaning wholesale. That jolt can be uncomfortable but it can wake a person. Jobs disappeared. Trust in authorities eroded. In response many turned to immediate intimacies to steady themselves. The intimacy was not sentimental. It was practical. It meant observing one another closely. It meant reading faces without the buffer of a notification. These were emergent survival skills as much as chosen experiments.
Attention as political resistance
Listening became a small act of refusal. Refusing to be distracted or placated was sometimes a political posture. That does not mean every attentive moment was heroic. Most were ordinary. Yet the collective pattern mattered. When the street organisation or the coffee house required attention it taught people how to be present together in public spaces. There is a civic value in showing up with attention that modern convenience often corrodes.
Craft over convenience
One simple consequence of fewer immediate conveniences was more time spent learning how things worked. Learning requires attention. It also demands repeated small failures. With repetition the mind stops sprinting and starts listening. That shift rearranges how you meet the next day. I am not advocating romantic poverty. I am noting that competence grows patient attention. And patient attention is the scaffolding for being present.
Presence was learned by doing not by reading a manual
There were no fast solutions for being present then. People learned by mending a jumper until their fingers knew the rhythm or by arguing about a new record until listening itself became an art. That form of practice kept attention muscle raw and ready. You can detect the same muscle in gardeners or carpenters today who will swear that their work taught them to attend to the world differently.
A word from an expert
The little things The little moments They arent little.
I include that sentence not to decorate an argument but because it actually nails a central truth. An expert whose life work has been about attention reminds us that the smallness of moments is an optical illusion. The 60s and 70s leaned into that truth not always consciously but in habit.
Why contemporary presence training misses something
Modern mindfulness often packages presence in tidy modules fifteen minute practices a day checklists. Those things are useful. But they sometimes detach presence from boredom failure and communal mess. The 60s and 70s were less obsessed with optimising attention and more comfortable letting it be ruffled. That discomfort is crucial because it teaches resilience. If every practice promises ease people may stop learning how to stay attentive when things go wrong.
Presence requires friction
Friction is not a glitch. It is the crucible. A life that has never been interrupted by real friction eventually develops brittle attention that shatters when a real crisis comes. The historical record is messy here but instructive. People rehearsed presence amid scarcity and unpredictability and they built a sturdier attention as a result.
My own clumsy experiments
I have tried to borrow some of those older habits. I keep a small ritual of listening to one record without doing anything else. I have noticed that the first five minutes are restless. My mind wants the scaffold of a device. Then it settles. I have also repaired things because the act of repair makes my hands recognize my attention before my head does. These are not remedies. They are experiments that reveal attention as a trained sense.
Listen to the edges
Not all of this can be turned into a how to. That is the point. Some of it only proves itself when you practice it and fail and practice it again. Presence in this sense is partial knowledge. It is more akin to learning a town by walking its wrong turns than reading a map. It will remain fragmentary because life is fragmentary.
What to take and what to leave behind
Steal the habit of low tech attention and leave the romantic clichés. The value here is not a costume it is an attitude. Reduce the speed of some daily processes. Put your hands on something that resists you. Notice what you notice. That is a practical route toward being present. It is not the only route but it is a stubborn one and it has been tested in real lives not laboratories.
Where the 60s and 70s mislead
Do not conflate presence with avoidance. Some people used the era to escape responsibility. Presence requires returning to the world not fleeing it. The old decades teach both generosity and difficulty. They do not offer a simple cure for modern restlessness but they show that attention can be habitual and communal.
I want to close by resisting tidy closure. The lesson is not a programme you can download. It is a set of habits that grow stubborn with repetition. It is communal practice accidental apprenticeship and the willingness to be imperfect in front of others. In short it asks that you be present enough to be boring sometimes and brave enough to keep coming back when being present fails you. That is not glamorous but it works.
Summary table
| Lesson | What it looked like then | How to try it now |
|---|---|---|
| Attention as habit | Long repairs shared in kitchens. | Practice a repetitive manual task without devices for 20 minutes. |
| Communal presence | Street meetings and coffee house debates. | Meet in person and listen without planning your reply. |
| Learning by doing | Fixing radios and records by ear. | Take a hands on hobby that resists instant mastery. |
| Friction builds resilience | Scarcity and unpredictability required attention. | Allow deliberate disruptions in routine and observe reaction. |
FAQ
How is presence in the 60s and 70s different from modern mindfulness?
Mindfulness today is often repackaged for efficiency short guided practices and quantified progress. Presence then was woven into everyday living because people had fewer technological buffers. That meant attention grew from repetition and community rather than from standalone exercises. Both approaches can be useful but they train slightly different capacities. The older approach trains attention in the ordinary unpredictability of life. The modern approach offers tidy entry points but sometimes fails to test attention under strain.
Can I replicate those older habits if I live in a big city now?
Yes but with adjustments. Urban life introduces its own textures of attention. Try small low tech rituals that anchor you to place. Repair something. Learn to listen to public conversation without the shield of a screen. The key is not geographic authenticity but creating pockets of sustained attention within your life. Those pockets will accumulate and change how you meet the rest of your week.
Is this article arguing for living like people did in the past?
No. This is not a call to time travel. It is an invitation to recover certain practices that encourage durable attention. Some conditions of the past are harmful and are rightly abandoned. What I recommend is selective borrowing the useful scaffolds for presence while keeping the rest of modern life that you need and value.
Will these practices make me happier immediately?
Expect uneven results. Presence is not a quick happiness hack. It sometimes reveals discomfort that had been deferred. In many cases the work of attending makes life feel fuller but not always smoother. The point is not an immediate uplift but a different relation to experience that can change how you respond over time.
How should I start this without feeling pretentious?
Start small and private. Pick one small act a day that requires attention and do it poorly at first. Let the awkwardness be part of the process. Presence is not polished performance. It is clumsy repetition that gradually becomes less clumsy.
