The 1960s were not a gentle training ground. They were chaotic, loud, contradictory and, for many who lived through them, oddly clarifying. If you were a child in that decade in Britain your world contained shifting rules and an odd steadying kind of instability. There was no single lesson taught in classrooms or at home. The lesson was lived. The claim I want to make up front is simple and uncomfortable. Growing up in the 60s did not make people resilient by accident. It shaped neural habits for dealing with not knowing. That shaping still matters today.
The particular grammar of 60s uncertainty
People remember the 60s as an era of liberation and music and revolution and yes those are true. But alongside those headlines ran everyday instabilities that rarely make it into sentimental histories. Parents who had survived wartime shortages were still improvising household economies. Technological change arrived in fits so that one week you had a new electrical appliance and the next week you were learning what to do when it broke. Social scripts loosened unevenly. For many families the social map no longer matched the terrain.
That disconnect created repeated small prediction errors for children. The brain learns by predicting and then correcting. When predictions are repeatedly wrong children build a tolerance for mismatch. Not a pleasant tolerance. A working tolerance. A readiness to reframe plans midstream and to conserve psychological energy for what actually matters. That readiness is neither heroic nor tidy. It is pragmatic and a little stubborn.
Why this is not the same as grit
Grit is often sold as endurance. What many 60s kids learned was a different skill: comfort with provisional answers. You do not only keep going when the plan collapses. You change the plan without treating the collapse as failure. This is not a motivational poster type of skill. It is a cognitive habit that governs how people allocate attention in ambiguous situations.
Voices from the experts
In order to succeed, people need a sense of self efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.
Albert Bandura Professor Emeritus Department of Psychology Stanford University.
Bandura helps anchor the idea that learned confidence and resilience depend on experience. Those early mismatches between expectation and reality do not produce uniform outcomes. They sculpt the way a person estimates risk and chooses when to seek new information. A childhood that often forced recalibration trains different circuits than a childhood organised around predictability.
Cultural agility is essential because professionals in a globalized world frequently work with teams spanning different cultural values communication styles and expectations.
Paula Caligiuri Professor D Amore McKim School of Business Northeastern University.
Caligiuri is talking about adults in global workplaces but the principle applies to people raised in patchy 60s social landscapes. They learned a kind of cultural agility at home on the cheap. It was messy training in the art of interpreting partial signals from confusing adults and flawed institutions.
Small unpredictable events become teachers
Children in the 60s learned from what I call microruptures. Those are the tiny everyday disruptions that force a child to reconceptualise right now. The bus that failed to turn up the day of a promised trip. The teacher who changed the topic midlesson. A television broadcast that suddenly switched tone. Each micro-rupture teaches expectation management. A child who experiences many such events has more practice tolerating misalignment between plan and reality.
This training is often invisible to the people who received it. They describe themselves as pragmatic or flexible but they are describing a set of internal habits. Habits about when to look for more information. Habits about how quickly to shut down a failing plan. Habits about whether to demand absolute clarity before acting.
Not everyone becomes comfortable with uncertainty
There are clear social moderators. Children with secure attachment and consistent adult responses could translate unpredictability into learning. Children who experienced unpredictability as threat and who lacked stable support sometimes internalised worry instead. The same decade produced both a readiness to experiment and brittle caution. So this is not a silver lining story. It is a complex historical effect.
What modern life borrows from the 60s brain
There is a curious continuity between the 60s training and contemporary demands. Modern careers reward people who can act with partial information. The 60s brain habitually kept options open. That habit becomes an asset in industries that prize iteration over grand plans. But there is a cultural mismatch. Today’s institutions often demand that we present certainty even when we lack it. The 60s trained brain resists this theatrical certainty and can be dismissive of performative confidence.
I am not arguing for romanticising the past. The 60s were not a training programme. They were full of real harms. But they were also an ecological niche that encouraged certain cognitive dispositions. Those dispositions now sit uneasily in a world that alternates between requiring quick adaptation and rewarding certainty theatre.
Personal note and a provocation
I grew up listening to stories of ration books and half fixed radios and adults who sometimes lied to protect a child’s calm. That strange mixture of concealment and improvisation taught me to read moods and to hedge my bets. I carry a habit of pausing before I commit. It is irritating to some colleagues and quietly useful in other situations. Perhaps that is the point. The 60s brain is not always efficient. It is cautious in a way that sometimes looks like slowness but can also prevent catastrophic missteps.
Here is a small provocation. Societies that prize polished certainty underinvest in the quiet skill of adapting to mismatch. We celebrate the person who sells a simple story about the future and we neglect the person who tolerates the jagged edges of reality. That neglect has political and organisational consequences. It makes institutions brittle when real shocks arrive.
Open ended close
People who came of age in the 60s are mixed repositories of caution curiosity and improvisation. They contain habits that are useful and habits that restrict. I have argued here that childhood experience in that decade did something measurable to how people tolerate not knowing. I do not claim this is destiny. It is pattern. And patterns can be nudged remade or discarded. Which ones we keep will tell us a lot about how well we handle the next era of unpredictability.
Summary table
| Key idea | How it emerged in the 60s | Lasting effect |
|---|---|---|
| Tolerance for ambiguity | Frequent small disruptions and shifting social scripts. | Habitual readiness to act with partial information. |
| Pragmatic recalibration | Everyday problem solving with limited resources. | Preference for iterative over grand plan approaches. |
| Cultural agility | Exposure to changing norms and diverse media. | Ability to adapt to different social rules and contexts. |
| Uneven outcomes | Variations in family security and support. | Some developed resilience while others developed chronic worry. |
FAQ
Did everyone who grew up in the 60s become more comfortable with uncertainty?
No. Childhood is filtered through social supports. Where adults offered reliable emotional scaffolding unpredictability could be converted into useful learning. Where unpredictability signalled threat and support was scarce the outcome often involved anxiety. The 60s created conditions that made certain cognitive habits more likely but not guaranteed.
How is the 60s experience different from modern childhood unpredictability?
The 60s unpredictability was often local and episodic. Modern unpredictability can be synchronous global noisy and mediated by always on platforms. The cognitive habit of dealing with local episodic mismatch does not always map neatly onto the relentless 24 7 churn of our present. That mismatch is an area where some older adults find their habits unexpectedly useful and sometimes ironically insufficient.
Can people learn the 60s style tolerance for uncertainty now?
Yes but not by nostalgia. Learning involves exposure to controlled mismatches with reliable feedback. Training that emphasises small iterative experiments perspective taking and supportive reflection builds similar habits. It is practice not myth. The difference from the 60s is these practices can be deliberately designed rather than accidentally inherited.
Does having this habit make someone better at work or life?
It depends on context. In roles that require rapid adaptation and reading of partial signals it can be a clear advantage. In systems that reward the appearance of certainty it can be penalised. The habit is a tool. How useful it is depends on whether the environment values flexibility over polished narratives.
Where can I read more about these ideas?
Look for literature on tolerance of ambiguity cultural agility and developmental effects of unpredictable environments. Work by psychologists on prediction error learning and social scientists on mid 20th century family life provides relevant angles. These fields approach the same pattern from different levels of explanation and together they help make sense of the lived effects I have described.
