There is a peculiar stubbornness in those who spent their formative years in the 1960s and 1970s. Not stubbornness about politics or haircuts this time but stubbornness about waiting. They learned to stand in lines and sit through delays without the fevered scroll or constant status check that defines modern impatience. That lesson was not tidy. It arrived through bus timetables that never matched reality, coal strikes that altered holidays, and banking queues that taught people a very practical view of time.
Why their patience was not passive
It is tempting to call the older generation patient in the soft way we praise virtue. But what they developed was an active stance toward waiting. Waiting meant recalibration. A missed bus was not merely a nuisance it was data. People learned to estimate the pattern of delays and to plan contingencies. The household that always left home ten minutes earlier because the 8 15 rarely turned up was not being patient so much as being strategic. That difference matters. Strategy carries agency; patience can imply resignation.
Learning by exposure not instruction
There were fewer systems designed explicitly to placate the waiting. No apps told you the exact status of a delivery. Telephones were landlines with busy signals. The experience taught a certain emotional bookkeeping. You learned which waits were worth fighting and which were waste. Grandparents and parents passed down rules that were not formalised but lived daily. These were rules about fairness about not cutting in and about recognising when an unexplained delay was actually meaningful.
“Most people didnt think that others behaviour had worsened since the pandemic a view which contrasts with that of industry staff.” said Professor John Drury Professor of Social Psychology University of Sussex.
That observation from a contemporary scholar helps explain continuity. Norms about queuing are resilient. They mutate but resist quick erasure. The 60s and 70s taught norms through repetition rather than signage and that repetition has echoes today when people revert to orderly single file in unfamiliar circumstances.
Waiting became a social grammar
Queues were not silent property lines of boredom. They were places where rules were taught out loud. You learned how to look at a line and know whether the person at the front had been there five minutes or an hour. You learned what the stare of someone meant when you tried to edge forward. These were embodied lessons about trust and visual truth. Visual cues mattered more than promises. Empty counters with staff looking busy were an open offense.
Why fairness beat speed
One of the quieter lessons of those decades was that fairness preserves future calm. If you admit someone ahead or if a shop clerk skips over a family you will pay for it in reputation not just in immediate grit. It is striking that many service designs now try to manufacture a sense of fairness as much as they try to shorten waits. The idea that an explained wait feels shorter is older than the internet. David Maister a thinker on the topic made this plain decades ago in a piece that still matters.
“Unexplained waits are longer than explained waits.” David Maister Lecturer and author formerly of Harvard Business School.
That sentence is small but it clarifies a cultural mechanism. Explain the delay and you save the atmosphere. Explain poorly and the wait metastasises into anger. Those who grew up before ubiquitous mass communication internalised this. They also expected explanations in face to face interactions. Silence was interpreted and punished.
Delays as structural truth not personal failure
People who came of age in the 60s and 70s learned a structural view of time. A rail strike was not an individual’s failure to plan. A closed local post office was not evidence of personal mismanagement. These were systemic realities that required adaptation. Once you treat delay as systemic the emotional burden shifts. You stop assuming your life should be frictionless and instead calculate acceptable friction. This is not a surrender to inconvenience. It is a pragmatic reallocation of emotional energy.
What this meant for trust
Ironically this structural view could make people more trusting in some settings. If delay is systemic then explaining it restores trust because the explanation fits the expected pattern. People did not demand perfection but they did demand coherence. Many modern service experiences break this rule by presenting perfect promises and failing to match them. A generation raised to read the room will judge the mismatch harshly.
There is also an ethics in the older waiting habit. It is an ethic of reciprocity. You do not elbow into line because you will need that social sanction later. It is messy and imperfect and not free of cynicism. People gamed the system too and favours were traded. But the baseline expectation of order mattered and it regulated behaviour in ways that algorithms only pretend to.
Where the lessons survive and where they do not
Today the feature set of waiting has changed drastically. Real time tracking has made some waits trivially short in friction. But other waits have become stealthier. Invisible delays blink into being across global supply chains and feel personal because they are invisible. The old generation handles these with a vocabulary that younger people lack they can say I have lived through three fuel shortages and two postal strikes so this is probably nothing. That lived history is a kind of psychological insulation. Yet that insulation can become arrogance when it discounts valid new expectations about speed and transparency.
A claim and a counterclaim
I do not romanticise the era. Waiting sometimes enforced inequality. Access to fast goods or services was unequal and that mattered hugely. The 60s and 70s taught endurance but they also normalised a tolerance of slow bureaucracy that we now contest. Still I will argue that there is an art in their approach worth recovering. That art is simple. Call delays what they are explain them and design systems that respect visible order even when speed is impossible.
Final thought
Waiting in those decades was a lived curriculum. It taught tactical patience fairness norms and a structural reading of disruption. The result was not a generation stoic to the point of passivity but a generation that built small adaptive strategies with social consequences. Those strategies can feel quaint or stubborn depending on your temperament but they are not without value. They remind us that waiting can be a social act that says as much about how we live together as it does about how quickly we get home.
Summary table
| Lesson | What it meant then | Why it matters now |
|---|---|---|
| Active patience | Adapting schedules to irregular services | Helps manage expectation in unpredictable systems |
| Social grammar | Queues taught fairness rules aloud | Orderly norms reduce conflict in shared spaces |
| Explained delays | Explanations soothed public frustration | Transparency still shortens perceived wait |
| Structural view | Delays seen as systemic not personal | Shifts emotion from blame to adaptation |
FAQ
Did everyone in the 60s and 70s really wait more patiently?
No. Patience was uneven across class gender and location. Some people experienced delay as oppression because lack of access to certain services was a structural problem. The piece celebrates certain pragmatic habits not the injustices. The difference to notice is method not morality. Many developed strategies because systems were patchy not because they wanted to endure poor service.
Are there concrete practices from that era that could improve modern services?
Yes. One practice is clear candid explanation of delays. Another is designing visible fair order when demand exceeds capacity. These are cheap in comparison to technical fixes and often buy goodwill. You get more satisfaction by shaping expectations than by smoothing every friction point. The trade off is that sometimes technical investment is the right long term choice but explanation remains essential in the interim.
Does this mean we should accept slower services now?
Not at all. The argument is about emotional economy. The article suggests treating delays as collective problems to be managed not as moral failings to be assigned. Speed remains a legitimate expectation when it is feasible. The key is aligning promises with delivery and preserving fairness when queues form.
Can younger people learn this mindset quickly?
Some can and many do when exposed to similar conditions. The mindset is more habit than trait. Experiencing an explained delay or participating in orderly systems can teach people to respond differently. What is harder to teach is the accumulated calibration that comes from many small real world disruptions over time.
How should public spaces design for waiting now?
Design should prioritise visible fairness and clarity. When capacity is strained show where people stand what order is being kept and why delays happen. Give people something meaningful to do while they wait and avoid empty distractions that feel manipulative. This is not revolutionary but it draws on a long history of social practice.
