There is a stubborn idea lodged in our cultural memory that hardship makes you harder in a straight line. Lives lived in the long upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s complicate that tidy story. Those decades did not simply train people to endure. They trained them to pivot. They taught a generation to redesign expectations midstream and to reframe the rules of normality on the fly. That kind of mental flexibility still shows up in kitchens and pubs and council meetings across Britain today.
Not toughness but nimbleness
I have spoken to people who survived rationed childhoods, three job changes in a year, and the arrival of technologies that felt like sleight of hand. They rarely used the word resilience because it sounded clinical. Instead they talked about knowing which things could be bent and which things had to be held. There is a moral impatience in that memory. It is muscular yet supple. It refuses the romance of never changing course.
The day by day education of adaptability
Imagine a world where public transport strikes reshuffled your week without warning and where the next-door neighbour could be an argument waiting to happen but also an improvised lifeline. The everyday unpredictability of the era sharpened pattern recognition in a way few modern routines do. People learned to read the tone of a conversation and decide whether to escalate or to re-route. That reading was not abstract. It was practice. It paid off later when careers splintered and households reformed.
Structural shocks that forced cognitive change
Economic disruption in those years was not an intellectual problem. It was practical. Factory closures, sudden inflation, and shifting labour expectations required people to update their scripts. If your father worked at a plant for thirty years and then there was no plant you either consigned yourself to victimhood or you rewrote your labour identity. Many rewrote. That rewriting is cognitive flexibility. It is the capacity to view long held assumptions as negotiable and then to make different choices.
Learning by improvisation
One of the most underreported lessons from the 1960s and 1970s is that improvisation was ordinary. The absence of fail safe systems meant improvisation became a shared grammar. People who grew up through those years acquired a tolerant relationship with uncertainty. They learned how to keep moving without certainty. There is a difference between relentless hope and a pragmatic habit of trying another route. I prefer the latter because it is less sentimental and more useful.
Social change as cognitive training
Decades of social turbulence recalibrated what people considered negotiable inside their own communities. When laws and social norms were contested in public, private minds were forced to accommodate new categories of identity and behaviour. That churned cognitive categories. A person who had to reassess their stance on class or gender in public conversation developed the mental habit of holding two competing perspectives long enough to extract a workable path. It is not an elegant process. It is messy and sometimes painful. But it often produced sharper decision making.
Why stubborn certainties weaken flexibility
Rigidity is cheaper in the short run. It conserves energy to believe one right answer. But the cost comes later when the environment demands novelty. Those who grew through the 1960s and 1970s often learned that a cheap certainty could become an expensive trap. They learned to test their beliefs with experiments small enough to survive but informative enough to change course. This is the mental economy of thrift with bets.
Flexibility is about winning the war and being more clever with how you do things rather than just getting your head down and throwing yourself into every battle that comes along.
Dr Josephine Perry Chartered Sports and Exercise Psychologist.
That quote from Dr Josephine Perry lands where the lived testimony lands. Adaptation is strategic not heroic. It is about keeping an eye on longevity rather than on the next headline. I will insist here that the popular idea of grit as sheer force misses the point. Grit without adjustment is an incurious grind. Flexibility trades some of that drama for a quieter skill set that outlasts crises.
Rituals of recalibration
People who lived through those decades developed rituals for recalibration. They did not call them rituals. They were habits. They called their mates for a frank assessment. They changed job roles without self-flagellation. They abandoned plans when the data said the plan had become fantasy. Those micro practices created a lifetime habit of course correction that resembles a muscle memory more than an ideology.
Generational contrasts are overrated
We like tidy generational narratives. Boomers are one thing. Gen X are another. But when you look inside the households and the neighbourhood networks that persisted across the 1960s and 1970s you find messy overlap. Mental flexibility did not land only on one demographic. It diffused into people whose lives were forced into repeated small decisions. That diffusion is the interesting part. It explains why some older people are still nimble and why some younger people seem brittle. Exposure matters more than label.
What the present borrows from the past
We live with certified comforts but also with brittle specialisations. The modern economy rewards deep expertise and punishes lateral restarts. There is a nostalgia in suggesting we should return wholesale to the past. I make no such claim. My point is narrower. The 1960s and 1970s taught a different relationship to contingency. They trained people to hold uncertainty without collapsing into anxiety or false certainty. Those skills are salvageable.
Personal reflections and a mild provocation
On a wet afternoon I watched a woman in a market stall change her pricing strategy when a weather shift thinned the crowd. It was an old fashioned adaptive move. It was also a tiny public lecture in how to think when the expected pattern dissolves. I am impatient with advice that dresses up self help as a moral failing if you do not succeed. A better conversation would be about systems that force repeated reinvention and whether we value the people who learn to make that reinvention sensible.
I will leave you with an unresolved angle. Mental flexibility is not purely an individual attribute. It sits in social scaffolding. It is easier to pivot when you have someone to vent to or an informal network to borrow skills from. That means policies and community practices shape cognitive habits as much as private choices do. I am not offering a program. I am urging attention to the social architecture that either nourishes or starves the capacity to adapt.
Summary table
| Key idea | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Daily unpredictability trained pattern recognition | People learned rapid assessment skills that later supported career and social pivots. |
| Economic shocks forced cognitive rewriting | Reframing long held identities became a practical necessity rather than a philosophical exercise. |
| Social turbulence recalibrated categories | Exposure to contested norms produced tolerance for holding competing perspectives. |
| Improvisation became ordinary | Frequent small experiments built habit based flexibility rather than brittle certainty. |
| Flexibility is strategic | It privileges longevity and adaptability over short term heroic endurance. |
FAQ
How did living through the 1960s and 1970s specifically change thinking patterns?
Those decades were full of abrupt changes in work housing and social norms. Repeated exposure to such change taught people to anticipate disruption and to keep backup plans that were realistic rather than idealistic. The practice of shifting plans in small ways created cognitive habits that favour reappraisal. Over time these micro adjustments accumulate into a pattern of mind that treats belief as provisional and action as reversible. This does not make people cold or indifferent. It makes them pragmatic and often more effective at navigating messy realities.
Is this mental flexibility universally positive?
No. Flexibility can become indecision if it lacks anchors. Without values or a north star people can flit between options and exhaust themselves. The useful version of flexibility that emerged from those decades combined openness with a pragmatic sensibility about which parts of life required stability. That balance is not automatic. It is a practice that some mastered and others struggled with.
Can younger generations learn this kind of flexibility?
Yes. The skillset is transferable but it requires exposure to varied perspectives and a tolerance for trial and error. Structured environments that punish small failures make learning hard. Environments that permit low cost experiments and encourage honest debriefs cultivate the habit. Community networks that share practical knowhow accelerate the process because they reduce the stakes of experimentation.
Does this article suggest we romanticise past hardships?
No. I reject romanticisation. The point is to extract a functional insight from a messy history. Hardship can teach valuable habits but it also costs real losses. The desirable aim is to create conditions where adaptive habits can form without forcing people into needless suffering. That requires social design and not nostalgia.
How should workplaces use this understanding?
Workplaces that value adaptability should create low stakes pilots encourage lateral learning and recognise incremental course corrections. Reward systems that only praise single minded stubbornness will produce brittle behaviour. A more useful approach would be to recognise and reward people who change course wisely rather than merely persist.
Those are the claims I will stand by even if you disagree. The past does not hand down a code. It offers practice rooms. We should be choosier about which rooms we rebuild and which we avoid.
