There is a stubborn line people draw between the 1960s and 1970s and our present day as if the earlier decades were an era of thicker skin and wider horizons. That claim feels partly true and partly sentimental. This piece argues that the 60s and 70s did not treat every problem as personal because the moral grammar of those years distributed blame and hope differently. I do not mean to romanticise. There were cruelties and blind spots. But the dominant habit of thinking in terms of public institutions social movements and collective fixes mattered. It changed how people experienced failure loss and anxiety.
Publics first private sorrow later
Read history and you will see how many of the great debates of that era were framed as public problems. Housing. Trade unions. Racial justice. Education. Unemployment. Even personal crises were often narrated through a public lens. A factory closure was not merely sadness in one household. It was an industrial policy failure and a communal wound to be debated in town halls and union rooms. That is not a minor linguistic shift. It rewires responsibility.
Not because people were sturdier
People were not emotionally tougher. They had fewer therapists but more neighbours who knew your name and your story. There was also less pressure to convert private pain into identity. If your marriage collapsed it could be a moral or economic issue as much as an inner catastrophe. That made grief procedural and social rather than permanently self defining.
Structures mattered more than self
The strongest reason the 60s and 70s looked less personalised was institutional density. Local councils trade unions community centres and a thriving print culture offered frameworks to interpret difficulty. If unemployment rose politicians and newspapers argued structural reasons and public remedies. Today an algorithm or an app tells an individual to pivot reskill or rebrand and quietly implies blame if they fail.
The shift is not simply bureaucratic. It is moral. When institutions present themselves as primary interpreters of life they allow people to offload blame. When institutions recede the inner life fills the gap. That is why the story of the last two decades is not just privatisation of services but the privatisation of sense making. That word privatisation is too neat but it captures something important. Replace it with erosion if you prefer. The point remains.
A historian nailed it
“The new Narcissus gazes at his own reflection not so much in admiration as in unremitting search of flaws.”
Christopher Lasch historian University of Rochester.
Lasch is often cited as doomful and unfair to the optimism of the 1960s. Still his point about inwardness is helpful. It alerts us to a cultural pivot where private anxiety becomes the primary lens for public topics.
Movements taught people to externalise
Social movements taught people to see causes rather than inner failings. The rock and roll of the 60s was noisy but not atomising. Feminists campaigned against legal structures not only intimate dynamics. Anti racism activists pointed at policing policy and schooling. That is a small but decisive difference from a culture that asks you to brand your trauma for attention.
One consequence is that political imagination remained open ended. People who were angry about housing or racism could imagine collective remedies. That is not to say solutions were simple or always successful. Often they were messy. But the frame shifted what people considered legitimate responses. The assumption was public problem public solution rather than private problem private therapy. Again this is partial and unstable and I refuse tidy conclusions.
Why did the later decades tilt inward
There are multiple drivers. Economic change matters. The decline of manufacturing and the rise of precarious service work undermined community anchors. Media transformation matters. Television and later digital platforms fragment common discourse. Ideology matters. Neoliberal rhetoric relocated responsibility toward the individual. Policy mattered. Welfare retrenchment made the individual an administrative subject rather than a protected citizen.
These factors did not flip a switch. They stacked. Each layer replaced one set of moral explanations with another. The effect is cumulative and hard to disentangle. You can name the economic indicators but they never fully capture lived orientation towards blame and hope. That is why debates about whether people are more anxious now miss the point. Anxiety is not simply psychological. It is interpretative. It tells you how people are taught to read misfortune.
Some small unexpected advantages
Not everything was better in the earlier period. There was stigma. There were fewer treatment options for addiction and mental illness. There were structural exclusions of race gender and class. Yet there were also more rituals that normalised communal grief and a grammar for collective anger. People were required to be publicly accountable in ways that yielded solidarity and stubborn civic memory.
That civic memory is underrated. It produced institutions that might be slow or even corrupt but were difficult to erase. When public action exists it restrains private atomisation by providing a shared vocabulary for suffering and repair.
What we lose when everything is personal
The most corrosive effect of hyperpersonalisation is political. If every problem is a private failing there is less pressure to demand institutional reform. Language that naturalises misfortune as an individual shortcoming reduces collective outrage. It domesticates anger into self help. That is the political cost. There is also a human cost. People become lonely caretakers of their own narratives with fewer interlocutors who share context.
I do not want a crude reverse argument that declares the past perfect and the present irredeemable. The therapeutic insights of modern psychology are valuable. But when therapy becomes the default idiom for social ills it narrows options. It privatizes solutions and normalises individual responsibility for structural failure. That tilt benefits some players in our economy while leaving others less visible and more exposed.
Thinking forward
We should take selective lessons from the 60s and 70s rather than attempt historical nostalgia. Rebuilding civic infrastructures does not require resurrecting every old institution. It requires reclaiming a habit: treating certain problems as belonging to a public domain and refusing to let private identity answer for public failure. This is not only policy. It is rhetorical. It is how we talk to each other about what went wrong.
The habit can be rebuilt slowly in places that matter local schools workplaces unions professional organisations and the press. It will not be tidy. It will be contested. But it is possible. And it is worth the trouble.
Closing thought
There are moments when private pain must be honoured alone and others where public response matters more. The 60s and 70s did not treat every problem as personal because a public imagination still existed that made collective remedy plausible. If we want similar courage today we need to restore that imagination and stop outsourcing every social failure to the interior life of individuals. That is a political and moral choice not a nostalgic preference.
Summary table
Key idea One The 60s and 70s framed many difficulties as public problems offering collective remedies.
Key idea Two Institutional density in those decades gave people vocabulary and venues to externalise blame.
Key idea Three Cultural shifts economic change and media transformation pushed later decades toward personalisation.
Key idea Four Privatising sense making reduces political pressure for institutional reform and increases loneliness.
Key idea Five Reclaiming a public imagination requires rhetorical policy and organisational rebuilding more than perfect nostalgia.
FAQ
Why focus on the 60s and 70s rather than earlier periods?
Because these decades are often invoked in cultural debates as a hinge between institutional public life and our more individualised present. They contained a sharp mix of activism and institutional presence that makes them a useful lens for thinking about how societies distribute responsibility. Earlier periods matter too but the particular media institutions trade union strength and postwar policies of the 60s and 70s created a distinctive public vocabulary that later decades eroded.
Does this mean therapy and personal growth are bad?
Not at all. Therapeutic language can be liberating and necessary. The piece is not an attack on therapy. It is an argument for balance. When therapeutic discourse crowds out collective interpretation it narrows political imagination and silences the communal remedies that might address large scale problems.
Are you suggesting policy can fix private suffering?
No. Policy cannot fix all private suffering and should not try to micromanage inner life. The suggestion is subtler. Policy and institutions can alter the contexts that produce many forms of suffering and can provide shared mechanisms of support and repair. Treating big social problems as public responsibilities reduces the unfair burden on individuals to become their own systems of care.
What practical steps could rebuild public imagination?
Strengthening local civic organisations encouraging workplace representation supporting robust local media and protecting public education and social infrastructure are practical starters. These steps create forums for shared interpretation and collective action. They are gradual but they change the grammar of blame and responsibility back toward the public sphere.
Is there any downside to restoring a public frame?
Yes. Public frames can be bureaucratic and exclusionary. They can also be slow and coercive. Restoring them requires vigilance and pluralism not hierarchical imposition. The aim is not to replace one dogma with another but to widen available responses so private anguish is not the only socially intelligible route.
End.
