There is a quiet competence among those born in the 1960s and 1970s that looks, to younger people, like an old trick they have not yet learnt. It is not nostalgia dressed up as wisdom. It is habit honed by a particular set of social pressures and contradictions. This article reads like a conversation across decades. It leans on observation, a few sharp claims, and one verified expert observation. Read on if you want to feel less hurried and a little more complicated about what meaning actually is.
How meaning was learned when interruptions were slower
People who came of age in the 60s and 70s learned to build a sense of significance under conditions that demanded patience. The systems around them were slower by design. Work was often more local. Friendships lasted across jobs. You did not curate identity in a single sitting. You had to live it. That created habits that still feel like a small craft manual for sitting with life in a way most digital natives never had to practise.
This is not to romanticise struggle. Plenty from that era was painful and unjust. But the way meaning grew there was structural. Relationships were layered. Jobs were contained by geography and expectation. Rituals were not inherited as social media content but enacted in kitchens and pubs and workplaces. Those rituals taught a kind of durable attention.
Not the same as resilience
Do not confuse this with the fashionable idea of resilience. Resilience is often sold as a product these days. What people from the 60s and 70s had was a loose manual for intention. They could sustain projects across years without constant external feedback. They experienced delayed payoff. They had to.
Technology changed what it meant to wait
Many writers shout that everything changed with technology. That is true but incomplete. The important change was not simply speed. It was the removal of absent time. The generations now growing up have fewer blank hours, fewer unscripted evenings, fewer spaces where meaning could gestate quietly without an audience. In that absence the mechanics of meaning become performative.
it’s technology. That’s what seems to be at the root of so many generational differences.
That line is not a sermon. It is a diagnosis. It points to why many of the small steady habits that produce meaning can look like relics. When you remove blank time people discover they must manufacture significance on demand.
Three quiet practices people born in the 60s and 70s still use
These are not prescriptions. They are patterns I have repeatedly noticed in interviews and long conversations. The practices do not sound dramatic. That is the point.
First there is the practice of cumulative narrative. People from those decades tend to tell their life as a single unedited story. It is not shown to an audience to be judged. It is explained to a listener to be understood. This creates an internal continuity that behaves like a compass.
Second there is the ritual of small obligations. The neighbour who watered your plants for years. The colleague who always arrived early. Little unpaid commitments knit identity into place. They are easy to overlook but they anchor you to a set of expectations and thus to a sense of consequence.
Third there is tolerance for mediocre days. The 60s and 70s cohort learned that not every day will be meaningful and that is acceptable. There is no performance requirement for meaning. That tolerance alone reduces the anxiety that eats intention.
Why younger people mistake this for complacency
To generations raised on visible success stories the modest rhythms of these practices look like passivity. The error is to evaluate meaning by its noise level. Quiet sequencing of small purposeful acts rarely trends. It rarely gets likes. Yet it accumulates like interest on an account you forget you have. The result is a life that can be interesting to the holder but unintelligible to observers who demand spectacle.
Where institutions taught what families cannot teach alone
One overlooked fact: the institutions of the 60s and 70s still shaped character. Employment structures, local clubs, and civic rituals offered predictable spaces to practice responsibility. Schools were less about credentials and more about social initiation. Unions and local industries gave a scaffold for reciprocal obligation. When those scaffolds eroded, the informal systems of meaning had to move elsewhere and in doing so they lost some of their durability.
This is a loss we misunderstand because we conflate freedom with liberty from obligation. The two are not identical. Obligation often supplies the necessary friction without which significance slips into novelty seeking.
My position: the current search for meaning is less noble than it looks
I want to be blunt. Much of the contemporary chase for purpose reads to me like a substitute for connection. We are told to find a vocation that will heal us or a side hustle that will sanctify us. That is outsourcing meaning to marketplace signals. People from the 60s and 70s generally treated purpose as a communal achievement not a brand identity. There is irony in idolising purpose while dismantling the social frameworks that produce it.
Does that make older generations better? No. They failed in many ways. But they offer techniques that are hard to package into advice columns. They were taught, forced, or conditioned to live with deferred validation and that trained attention in ways we undervalue.
Where this thinking leads but does not finish the job
Bringing back useful rituals is not the same as trying to rewind history. The point is selective rescue. Take the useful parts and leave the rest. Keep the tolerance for mediocre days. Keep the small unpaid commitments. Rebuild institutions where we can. That is messy. It requires public work and private patience. It may also look boring when compared with one weekend viral stunt promising existential revelation.
Conclusion: meaning as an apprenticeship
People born in the 60s and 70s learned meaning like carpentry. There were tools. There was practice. There were mentors and time to screw up. The modern condition often lacks those conditions. That is why younger people experience the search for meaning as urgent and fragile. The remedy is not a new app. It is fewer interruptions, more obligations that matter to others, and rituals that are difficult to monetise but essential to live by.
I do not expect everyone to adopt the tone of those decades. Some things have improved. Freedoms increased. Opportunities opened. But alongside those gains went the erosion of certain styles of attention. If you want to learn the kind of meaning that lasts ask someone born in the 60s or 70s about the small things they did that year after year quietly mattered. You will find less glamour and more stubborn labor.
Summary table
| Key idea | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Slower social rhythms | Allowed meaning to mature without constant external validation. |
| Cumulative narrative | Produced continuity in identity rather than episodic performance. |
| Small unpaid obligations | Anchored individuals to communities and provided consequence. |
| Tolerance for mediocre days | Reduced pressure to manufacture constant significance. |
| Institutional scaffolding | Offered predictable spaces to practise responsibility and belonging. |
Frequently asked questions
Why do people born in the 60s and 70s seem calmer about meaning?
Calmness is the wrong word but it captures a perception. Many in those decades practised attention across decades. They lived through social systems that rewarded long arcs rather than immediate visibility. That built habits of delayed gratification and a private continuity that looks like calm to onlookers. It is not universal. Plenty of people from those cohorts are restless. The pattern is common enough to be noticeable but not so universal as to be deterministic.
Can younger generations learn these habits?
Yes and no. Habits require a cultural context. You can deliberately cultivate small unpaid obligations and keep regular unstructured time. You can tell your personal story more to close listeners and less to public feeds. Those practices are transferable but they are harder to maintain without community structures that reward them. Individual effort helps but social design matters more than most people admit.
Are the older rituals backward looking?
Some rituals are backward looking and exclusionary. Not everything from the past deserves rescue. The useful ones are practical forms of attention and reciprocity. The test is whether a ritual sustains connection without imposing unfair burdens. If it does, it is worth keeping. If it simply preserves an unequal status quo it should be discarded.
Does this mean technology is the villain?
Technology is neither monster nor saviour. It removed layers of absent time and changed how we measure ourselves. That matters. But the technology itself can also be repurposed to support rituals and community if design choices prioritise slow accumulation over instant metrics. Blaming the device obscures the harder work which is to rebuild public and private spaces that encourage sustained attention.
What should institutions do if they want to help people find lasting meaning?
Institutions should create predictable opportunities for responsibility that are not purely transactional. That means investing in local civic life, accessible long term programmes that reward incremental contribution and spaces where cumulative narratives are told and heard. Such investments do not promise immediate returns but they produce civic goods that cannot be easily measured in short cycles.
