There is a stubborn, slightly uncomfortable truth in saying that people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s often carried a sturdier sense of who they were. This is not nostalgia for bell bottom jeans or vinyl records. It is an argument about identity formation shaped by social rituals scarcity of distraction and repeated responsibility. In this piece I will push back against the sentimental view and the neat academic narratives and try to describe what actually hardened and softened the self during those decades.
The scaffolding of a self that learned to stand
Growing up then meant living inside fewer curated narratives. Information came in dribs and drawn-out flows. Young people waited for the evening news or a long radio program not because they had no options but because scarcity forced deliberation. Time was not merely measured it was felt. The result was a subtle and relentless pressure to consolidate your experiences into simpler coherent shapes. That consolidation is the raw material of identity.
Why fewer choices can sharpen rather than dull
I do not mean to glorify scarcity. Material hardship can break people. But there is a difference between scarcity as trauma and scarcity as constraint that channels attention. When you have one apprenticeship one job and a field of neighbours who expect something of you the mirror is constant. The contemporary buffet of identities invites sampling. It also teaches a certain shrugging detachment. For many boomers and early Gen Xers the mirror demanded an answer and the answer had to last.
Rites that stuck
The rites of passage those informal public reckonings that marked adolescence were simple and raw. Leaving school starting an apprenticeship joining a union or moving towns were not curated Instagram moments. They were messy lived consequences. That mess required people to revise themselves on the go to hold a role and to be accountable to real others not virtual audiences. Accountability is an underrated architect of the self.
Community as an unlikely identity coach
Communities then operated like slow editors. They did not only appraise your successes; they absorbed your failures into a narrative you could not easily delete. That absorption forced narrative work: you explained yourself to neighbours to figure out what you were doing in the world. This repeated rehearsal of self to others produces a sturdier internal narrator. It is not pretty but it is effective.
Political upheaval as workshop for moral contours
There is a tendency to reduce the 1960s and 1970s to a set of aesthetic signifiers. Do not. The political and cultural ruptures of those decades served as identity laboratories. People chose sides and then found out whether those choices felt right when the dust settled. Political formation then was less about performing allegiance and more about making consequential commitments. Those commitments revealed limits and possibilities in ways social media declarations rarely do.
People come to talk about their lives as if telling a story gives them a sense of coherence and direction. The life story is the primary vehicle through which modern people knit their lives into a coherent pattern. Dan P. McAdams Professor of Psychology Northwestern University
The quote above is blunt and useful. Narrative work matters. But what the 1960s and 1970s added was the constant need to test your story against institutions and neighbours who mattered. That testing was not always fair. It was often brutal. But it forced plausibility upon personal mythmaking.
Work rhythms that trained endurance
Many adults today have jobs built on rapid pivots and gig unpredictability. That unpredictability is its own teacher. Still the mid century pattern of longterm employment apprenticeship and a limited career ladder taught planning and compromise. People learned to accept deferred gratification and to negotiate identity with employers not just clients. That slow negotiation hardened a sense of continuity. You did not churn identities you lived them.
Hands on of life
There was also an enormous amount of physical practical competence expected of people. Fixing a car patching a roof minding a child. Those direct tasks feed self efficacy in a way abstractions cannot. Doing something with your hands and seeing a result ties identity to capability. Social theorists might call it embodied confidence. I call it practical stubbornness.
Information scarcity and the inner life
Without constant scrolling people learned to sit with a few books a friend and their own contradictory thoughts for longer stretches. Boredom in that context was a productive force. It invited rumination and narrative smoothing where we turn messy episodes into themes and lessons. There are costs to enforced solitude but also gifts: reflection that is slow enough to hold complexity and nuance. Contemporary life often substitutes novelty for depth.
A counterpoint: exclusion and rigidity
We must not romanticise. Stronger identities in that era were often built by systems that excluded and coerced. Gender roles and racial hierarchies boxed people in and denied many the right to narrate themselves. What I am arguing is not that those decades were morally superior. They produced identity solidity in ways that had both generative and injurious outcomes. The important question is how to learn the strengths without reimporting the harms.
Lessons for people trying to grow a steadier sense of self today
Identity formation is not a museum piece that we can only admire. Some mechanisms of mid century social life can be deliberately recreated. Choose depth over breadth in a few commitments. Find communities that enforce accountability rather than applause. Do repetitive work that produces visible outcomes. Read slowly. Tell your story out loud to people who disagree. These are not easy prescriptions and they are not universally desirable. They are practices that produce narrative resilience.
Final thought left unfinished
The real paradox is this. Stronger identities can make people both freer and narrower. They allow you to act from a stable centre but sometimes that centre refuses to move. I suspect the best path is an odd hybrid: durable commitments that admit revision. The 1960s and 1970s taught us how to build durable commitments. Our era must invent how to keep that durability while not repeating the coercions that accompanied it.
Summary table
| Feature of 1960s 1970s | How it shaped identity |
|---|---|
| Fewer media choices | Concentrated attention and deeper narrative consolidation. |
| Strong community rituals | Repeated public accountability that forced coherent self explanation. |
| Political upheaval | Opportunity for consequential moral commitments and testing. |
| Longterm work patterns | Negotiated continuity with institutions building endurance and role identity. |
| Hands on practical tasks | Embodied competence linking identity to capability. |
| Costs | Exclusionary norms and rigidity that limited many peoples autonomy. |
FAQ
Did everyone who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s develop a stronger identity?
No. The processes I describe were uneven. For many people the same social forces produced brittle pride or closed mindedness. Strength in identity can mean stubbornness as much as stability. Socioeconomic status gender race and geography all mattered. Some people were empowered by these structures others were trapped. The lesson is to parse the mechanisms not to sentimentalise the era.
Can people today deliberately build the same kind of identity advantages?
Yes to a degree. The core practices are replicable: choose fewer narrative threads pursue commitments that matter beyond immediate applause and create embodied competence through repeated tasks. But replication must be adapted so it does not reproduce the exclusions of the past. Accountability must be voluntary not coercive and commitments must be revisable not ossified.
Were the political movements of those decades necessary for forming identity?
Political struggle was not the only vector but it was a major one. Political choices forced people to take moral positions that endured beyond slogans. That endurance is one reason identity felt heavier more consequential. But not everyone engaged politically and many formed robust identities through work family craft and local institutions outside national politics.
Is narrative identity the same as personality?
They overlap but are not identical. Narrative identity is the story you tell about yourself. Personality includes temperamental traits and habitual ways of feeling and thinking. Stories frame traits and give them meaning. You can be extroverted and still have an uncertain life story. The decades in question pushed people toward clearer stories which in turn shaped how traits expressed themselves.
How should societies encourage healthier identity formation today?
Encourage slow apprenticeships and visible mastery. Create institutions that reward longterm contribution and not just viral visibility. Support communal spaces where people must answer for their actions. And crucially avoid imposing rigid roles. The aim is to foster durable narrative capacity while protecting pluralism and mobility.
