There is a strange calm at play when you watch someone who grew up in the 1970s ignore a flashy offer that would have swallowed a younger person whole. It is not virtue signalling. It is not a stunt. Call it stubbornness if you like. More accurately it is an accumulation of small cultural habits that make immediate thrills less alluring and small delays matter more.
Small delays felt different then
Growing up in the 70s in Britain meant living in a slower economic and technological rhythm. Families kept things until they were fixed. Shops shut in the afternoon and opened again later. If you wanted a specialist you waited on a list and you did not treat waiting as failure. These are banal observations but they matter because habits shape impulse long before words like willpower entered everyday talk.
Not just scarcity
People often reduce this to material scarcity. That is too neat. Scarcity gives a reason to clutch at immediate rewards. The 70s had scarcity and also routines that taught people that later could be reliably better. A repaired bicycle came back stronger. A letter replied to later felt like a message that had weight. The idea that future effort could be meaningful was reinforced in how everyday life worked.
What the psychologists say
Decades of research show that the ability to wait is not solely a personality trait. It is at least partly learned. That does not make it some socialist lecture about upbringing. It means environments tune expectations. If your childhood made the future look like a place that honors patience you are more likely to treat delays as investments rather than punishments.
“What was very important was a dimension that had been completely unstudied in psychology. Namely the willingness and ability to delay gratification and to wait for the later rewards rather than settling for smaller ones.” Walter Mischel Professor of Psychology Columbia University.
This is not a mystical summation. Mischel showed that children who could delay small rewards often did better on later life measures. But importantly his work also shows techniques can be taught and that the social context matters. The 70s social context taught those techniques by accident.
Habits built into daily flow
Look at three tiny rituals and how they add up. One, things were repaired rather than replaced, which normalised delay and problem solving. Two, media arrived in schedules: there was one evening news bulletin and a weekly comedy. Anticipation was built into life. Three, social interactions required face to face, not instant messaging. These factors are not headline grabbers yet they train attention differently.
Why that still matters
To be clear I am not defending conservatism or romanticising hardship. I am pointing to causality that matters when you try to understand why some people find instant wins unsatisfying. They have tacit knowledge that patient accumulation yields more stable satisfaction. They have a sense that some pleasures are richer when earned.
What modern life swapped for speed
We live now in a marketplace designed to collapse time. Apps reduce waiting to microseconds. Algorithms give immediate reinforcement. There is a cost. Instantaneity erodes the small rituals that train the brain to value waiting. For many people the future feels less trustworthy and that increases anxiety which feeds into desire for immediate reward.
I do not think speed is morally bad. It is exhilarating and powerful. The problem is the erosion of the muscle that tells you to delay for a better result and then stick with the delay. Tech companies profit from that erosion.
Personal observation
I have watched a man in his sixties choose a modest handbag over a shinier brand on impulse because the modest bag would last longer. He did not explain this as thrift. He said casually My last bag lasted 11 years. He treated longevity as a kind of moral weather. He was not lecturing. He was not trying to be different. He had absorbed a default orientation to time that made durability a desirable trait. It looks like an odd aesthetic choice but it is a time preference embedded in everyday life.
Not everyone raised in the 70s is immune
We must not overstate. Plenty of people from that era chase instant rewards too. The point is statistical not absolute. Shared cultural scaffolding nudged many toward a future oriented stance. But scaffolding weakens when institutions or economic conditions shift. When waiting no longer reliably pays off people adapt and short term wins become rational again.
Practical consequences for relationships and work
People who learned to value delay treat promises differently. They are less likely to break things into disposable commitments. In workplaces they may push for long arcs rather than quarterly fireworks. In relationships they tolerate slow reconnection and invest in rituals. That can be infuriating to someone who believes choice should be frictionless. I find it useful to recognise these differing temporal logics rather than write them off as stubbornness or old fashionedness.
What we lose and what we gain
We gain convenience and a ridiculously wide range of choice. We lose a public architecture that taught patience by default. This is not a clear moral calculus. There is value in both poles. My position is that the loss of patient habits is undernoticed and deserves rethinking. It is possible to keep speed where it serves and reinstate slow rituals where they matter.
Some interventions that are not hokum
Teach the reality of deferred returns. Make waiting visible and reliable. Reinstate small communal rituals in families and workplaces. These are not new ideas exactly. They are simply less fashionable.
Closing note
People raised in the 70s do not chase instant gratification because their ordinary world trained them to expect that small delays could produce a richer outcome. That training has value now even if you do not want to return wholesale to the past. The trick is to be deliberately selective. Keep the good slow things and keep the fast good ones too.
| Idea | What it means |
|---|---|
| Delay as training | Everyday routines taught patience through repeated experiences of reliable future payoffs. |
| Cultural scaffolding | Shared practices like repair and scheduled media reinforced time preference away from the immediate. |
| Modern trade off | Speed produces choice but erodes the muscle of delayed gratification unless actively preserved. |
| Practical fix | Reintroduce visible reliable delays and communal rituals that reward future oriented behaviour. |
FAQ
Does growing up in the 70s guarantee someone will avoid instant gratification?
No. Upbringing shapes tendencies not determinism. Many variables alter outcomes including personal experiences social class and later life events. The patterns are probabilistic and contextual. The observation is that the cultural environment of that decade nudged a significant number of people toward valuing delayed outcomes but it did not make them immune to impulses.
Can people today learn the same habit of waiting?
Yes. Research indicates that delay can be taught and that contexts which make future rewards predictable improve self regulation. Practical techniques include setting up reliable small delays and celebrating long horizon wins. The challenge is resisting commercial systems optimised to reward immediate action. You have to design counterincentives into your day.
Is this about money or something deeper?
It is deeper. Money is often the visible element but the underlying issue is how daily life treats time. If the future is coherent and responsive then waiting becomes meaningful. If the future feels random then immediate consumption looks smarter. The 70s habit was not purely economic thrift. It was an embodied faith that time would keep its promises.
Are there downsides to valuing delay?
Yes. Overvaluing delay can make you miss spontaneous pleasures or punish reasonable day to day flexibility. It can also produce moralising attitudes toward others who choose otherwise. The balance is to be selective about where patience gives value and where speed improves life.
How should families today foster useful patience?
Make future rewards tangible. Create predictable rituals that link effort to later benefit. Avoid turning waiting into punishment. Let children and adults experience small trustworthy deferrals. This builds a sense that postponing can be a strategy not a deprivation.
Is nostalgia clouding our judgement about the 70s?
Sometimes. Nostalgia can polish faults into virtues. My claim is not that the 70s were perfect. They were not. Rather certain mundane practices that were normal then have been discarded without much debate and whether intentionally or not that matters for how people orient to time now.
