The people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s did not merely survive upheaval. They learned to think around it. This is not a tidy heroic story of gritty endurance. It is a messy, uneven apprenticeship in improvisation shaped by daily unpredictability politics fashion jobs migration and rapid cultural churn. That apprenticeship left a kind of cognitive callus a readiness to shift frames and a tolerance for ambiguity that still shows up in how many of those people approach decisions work and relationships today.
The small daily shocks that trained a different mind
When we speak of the sixties and seventies we often leap to the big images protests concerts long hair and new music. Those matter. But the more consequential teacher was the accumulation of small instabilities. Changing neighbourhoods factories closing the sudden arrival of new media and the slow ungluing of certainties about class and authority. People learned to routinely adapt routines because plans were habitually interrupted. That repeated recalibration is a different kind of education than a diploma. It builds an automatic habit of testing assumptions before committing to them.
Learning to expect contingency
Imagine planning a weekend only to have transport strikes policing or weather collapse your plans. The response that became commonplace was not just annoyance but a repertoire of alternatives. A spare route a neighbour to call an improvisation that worked. Over time this turns into an instinct: I will hold hypotheses lightly. I will hedge my commitments. I will keep options open. That mental posture is the heart of what researchers call cognitive flexibility and it frequently matters more than raw information in messy real world problems.
Networks not narratives
One underestimated consequence of the era was the multiplication of social worlds. People changed jobs more often in many sectors moved cities experimented with communal living or swapped neighborhoods across class lines. Those moves created network agility. Knowing two different social codes makes you better at code switching and at reading which rules matter in a given moment. That skill is underrated because it is social rather than intellectual but it rewires how one thinks about problems. You stop asking Which answer is right and start asking Which answer fits this set of people and constraints.
How scarcity sharpened creativity
There was also a thrift to thinking. With fewer ready made consumer fixes on every shelf people reused repurposed and fixed. The exercise of making do expanded imaginative problem solving. It produced a kind of practical creativity that is not glamorous but profoundly adaptive. It changed expectations about where solutions could come from; not from experts alone but from neighbours from unlikely tradespeople from improvisation under constraint. Those are cognitive habits.
Why this matters now
We tend to value specialised training and deep expertise and rightly so. But we undervalue the temperament that says I can pivot. The generation that lived through the sixties and seventies learned that temperament through repeated exposure to uncertainty rather than through a course. It is now visible in how many of them respond to technological disruption in their middle age. They are more likely to try a new platform to renegotiate work arrangements or to reframe an identity rather than collapse under the weight of a lost career script. That is not universal but it is common enough to be a pattern.
What I was saying was Can you identify stressed children who are making it here in your school. There would be a long pause after my inquiry before the answer came. If I had said Do you have kids in this school who seem to be troubled there wouldnt have been a moment’s delay. But to be asked about children who were adaptive and good citizens in the school and making it even though they had come out of very disturbed backgrounds that was a new sort of inquiry.
Garmezy was talking about resilience in children but his point resonates. Resilience is visible when systems are stressed. It is the ability to improvise within constraints. The daily unpredictability of those decades was an extended stress test; for many people it taught a habit of mental rehearsal for alternative futures.
Education and habit not theory
Official schooling in that era often lagged behind lived experience. Family learning peer learning and on the job tackling mattered more. Those informal educations trained a different sort of meta skill. People learned to triangulate information sift partial truths and to weigh practical signs over comforting narratives. That tendency made them sceptical of tidy frameworks which in turn produced a willingness to change their minds when reality forced them to. That is painfully simple and underappreciated: repeated exposure to partial information trains you to be comfortable acting without total clarity.
Why modern comfort with certainty can be a liability
Today many systems reward clarity and decisive certainty even when the situation demands nuance. Certainty can bring short term wins but it also encourages brittle thinking. The sixties seventies cohort learned to trade certainty for adaptability. They were not always right but they were often ready to adjust without ego collapse. That readiness looks judicious in retrospect even when the choices they made at the time were messy or wrong.
Not all adaptation is noble
I am not romanticising. Adaptation sometimes masked withdrawal or moral compromises. Not every flexible person used that quality ethically. Flexibility can be a tool of avoidance as well as a resource for growth. The point is pattern not judgement. The era produced cognitive habits that remain visible and influential now. Some of those habits are admirable others complicated. Recognising them helps us decide which to cultivate and which to question.
What we can learn from that generational skill set
If you want to borrow this mental stance without living through the same shocks cultivate small intentional disruptions practise shifting frames and accept mundane constraints as opportunities for exercise. Read across genres talk to people with different rules rehearse alternative plans and loosen the grip on the narrative that says there is one right way. These are techniques not silver bullets. They will change how you respond but they will not remove all pain or uncertainty.
Final blunt thought
People who grew through the sixties and seventies did not emerge as omniscient sages. They became experienced experimenters. The quality that looks like resilience is in large part a muscle built by years of repeated small adaptations. The muscle is imperfect and human and often misapplied. But it is also durable.
Summary table
| Pattern | How it formed | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Expectation of contingency | Frequent social and logistical disruptions | Leads to hedging and flexible planning |
| Network agility | Changing jobs and neighbourhoods | Improves code switching and contextual problem solving |
| Practical creativity | Resource scarcity and repair culture | Encourages repurposing solutions from informal sources |
| Informal meta learning | Peer and on the job learning over theory | Teaches working with partial information |
FAQ
Did everyone who lived through the 1960s and 1970s become mentally flexible?
No. Life experience produces tendencies not destinies. Social class geography personality and individual trauma shaped who developed flexibility and who did not. The patterns described are probabilistic not deterministic. Some people hardened into rigid worldviews despite the chaos. Others used turmoil to open and experiment. Context and choice both matter.
Is mental flexibility the same as resilience?
They overlap but are not identical. Resilience is about recovering from setbacks. Mental flexibility is about shifting perspectives handling ambiguity and changing strategies. Someone can be resilient in the sense of bouncing back yet be slow to change their mental models. Flexibility tends to make resilience easier but they are separable constructs.
Can younger generations develop the same skill set without experiencing similar upheaval?
Yes to an extent. Deliberate practice can cultivate flexibility. Expose yourself to diverse social groups take on tasks outside your comfort zone and practise reframing problems. These are training moves that simulate the adaptive learning produced by unpredictability. The moral is you can manufacture some of the benefits without suffering the exact hardships of prior decades.
Are these adaptive habits useful in professional life?
Often yes. Work that involves uncertainty novelty or complex human interaction benefits from thinking that is adaptive contextual and pragmatic. Industries and roles that fetishise certainty may undervalue those habits but in volatile environments the ability to revise plans quickly is an asset. The key is to balance flexibility with accountability and to avoid using adaptability as an excuse for lack of follow through.
Does this mean we should try to recreate hardship to build mental flexibility?
No. Hardship carries real costs and is not a morally acceptable tool. The takeaway is not that suffering is desirable but that varied experience and manageable challenge nurture adaptive habits. Intentionally seeking learning edges and manageable experiments is a safer route to build similar cognitive skills without inflicting harm.
