There is a stubborn intelligence anyone who spent childhood in the 1960s carries. It is not a quaint set of rules about manners or a list of household remedies. It is a pattern of thinking about risk and patience and community that is often invisible to those raised in an always-on economy. This piece is not nostalgia. It is an attempt to name the habits and assumptions that served people born in that decade and to argue that some of those habits would, if resurrected selectively, help now.
Born in a decade of contradiction
The 1960s were loud and messy and full of change. Yet the people born then learned a paradox: history can feel overwhelming and still be survivable. They watched institutions wobble and saw daily life reweave itself. That produced a tolerance for uncertainty that looks like steadiness. They were taught to wait for answers more often than we teach our children today. The waiting was not passive. It was a skill for calibrating action against consequence.
Not all patience is the same
There is a difference between passive resignation and disciplined delay. People born in the 60s learned the latter because many choices required real physical effort and visible time. To get a job meant showing up and proving you could be useful across months not micro-moments. To save money meant a boring repetitive act of denial that had real outcomes. These practices trained a mind that anticipates slow feedback. Today there is triumphal impatience. Quick feedback loops reward surface confidence instead of durable competence.
They expected repair more than replacement
Repair is a cultural muscle. If your washing machine breaks you learn how to unclog it. When a friendship frayed you were expected to fix it or let it go after working on it. Replacement as first resort is a modern invention supported by logistics and marketing. The 60s cohort tended to tolerate friction because fixing requires humility and some curiosity about mechanisms. That curiosity often created community repair rituals a screen cannot replicate.
The phone based life makes it difficult for people to be fully present with others when they are with others and to sit silently with themselves when they are alone. — Jonathan Haidt Professor of Ethical Leadership New York University Stern School of Business
Haidt is speaking about how modern technology interrupts presence. The people born in the 60s had fewer mediated interruptions. That is not to romanticise their childhoods. It is simply to point out how attention shapes the ability to live through trouble rather than be overwhelmed by it.
They treated community as leverage
Community for them was not only moral warmth. It was utility. You borrowed tools. Neighbours babysat. You learned to trade time for trust. The calculus of interdependence was explicit. That created thicker social safety nets than the ephemeral networks many people cling to today. The modern myth of independence confuses self sufficiency with isolation. People born in the 60s could be fiercely independent and still be networked in nonperformative ways.
Practical trust versus performative belonging
Practical trust flows from mutual obligation not from curated identity. When someone from that generation says they will be there at nine they usually mean it. The social cost of unreliability was higher. That is partly because reputations took longer to repair and partly because communities were smaller and more overlapping. A single act could cascade into long term effects. That gave people a habit of thinking about consequences in a way we have outsourced to algorithms and contracts.
They had a more granular relationship with risk
Risk in the 1960s and 70s was visible. People saw the consequences of decisions in population level phenomena like workplace injury or different environmental hazards. That education produced a cautious competence. It was not risk aversion so much as risk literacy. You assessed trade offs because you had to build safety into plans that lacked modern consumer protections. Those who grew up then learnt to accept manageable risks and to design for them. Modern life often pretends risk does not exist until it becomes headline news.
Work ethic that trusted time not hustle
Hustle culture tells stories in viral bursts. The 60s cohort internalised a longer story arc. Progress was measured across decades not across quarterly metrics or follower counts. That created a tolerance for projects that mature slowly and for reputations that are cumulative rather than sensational. This does not mean they were uniformly patient or wise. It means the incentives around them rewarded incremental competence. Today incentives favour spectacle, which undermines long game thinking.
What we mistake for wisdom
People today often say elders are conservative by default. Sometimes they are but often the so called conservatism is a memory of consequences. Experience is not always conservatism. It is the retention of negative outcomes as data and the use of that data to shape plausible futures. That kind of conservatism can look wise when circumstances repeat and brittle when they do not.
What to borrow and what to leave behind
The aim is not to become caricatures of another era. There are things worth leaving behind: dogmas, exclusions, outdated norms. But there are habits we can borrow. Relearning repair and practicing steady attention are small changes with outsized effects. Teaching kids how to tolerate boredom without screens is not repression. It is training for a life that will sometimes require slow problem solving. Encouraging repairable relationships means accepting mundane negotiations rather than digital exits.
Some things are paradoxical. Reintroducing durable expectations into a fluid economy will feel unfair to many. Norms that supported stability for some excluded others. The 60s taught both empathy and neglect, nobility and small mindedness. We do not get to pick only the good lessons. That tension should be acknowledged before we adopt any posture that claims to be purely restorative.
Final thought
People born in the 60s carry a set of practices shaped by scarcity of attention, visible consequences, and denser local communities. Those practices do not map neatly onto our world. Yet pockets of them could blunt some of today’s extremes. The question is not whether to return wholesale. The question is what selective muscles we want to build into 21st century life. I want the muscle that helps me wait when waiting matters. I want the muscle that makes me fix things because sometimes fixing is the only path back to decency.
Summary table
| Lesson | What it taught | Why it matters now |
|---|---|---|
| Measured patience | Delay as strategy rather than passivity. | Helps resist viral incentives and hasty pivots. |
| Repair culture | Fixing household and social problems increases resilience. | Reduces waste and builds practical trust. |
| Practical community | Interdependence as routine. | Provides real world safety nets beyond apps. |
| Risk literacy | Assessing trade offs without panicking. | Useful when systems fail and headlines lie. |
| Long game work ethic | Progress measured over years. | Builds durable competence not flash reputation. |
FAQ
What exactly did people born in the 60s do differently about friendships?
They treated friendships as ongoing projects. That meant more negotiation and more private labour. Repairs were made face to face and often required awkward apologies. In a culture of instant exits the quiet work of reconciliation looks inefficient. But it preserves networks that can be relied on in crisis. The trade off is obvious. Repair takes time that could be spent elsewhere. But when social insurance is thin the time invested in relationships pays practical dividends.
Is this article arguing for a return to old social norms?
No. The aim is selective recovery. Many norms from the past were unjust or exclusionary. I am interested in particular habits not entire moral packages. Learning to tolerate boredom and to repair things are skills any era can use. I am not advocating for the prejudices that accompanied many mid 20th century institutions. The point is pragmatic not nostalgic.
How can someone in their twenties adopt these habits without seeming backward?
Start small. Practice saying you will do something and then do it. Try repairing an item before replacing it. Reduce one habitual screen check each day and note what you noticed in its absence. These acts are not backward. They are investments in attention and competence. Over time they change the signals you send and the kinds of people you attract into your life.
Does technology undo these lessons entirely?
Technology shifts incentives but does not make the underlying skills impossible. Repair tutorials exist online. Communities can be networked rather than local. The problem is incentives. Algorithms rarely reward slow work. That does not mean slow work is extinct. It means we must consciously cultivate contexts where it is visible and valued.
Are there risks in trying to emulate these lessons?
Yes. One risk is selective memory. People often recall the good habits and forget the harms. Another risk is romanticising scarcity. We should not fetishise the hardships of older generations. The exercise should be critical. Take the useful parts and leave the rest. That is the ethical way to borrow from the past.
