The old shorthand says we lost something to progress. That is too tidy. The 1960s and 1970s did not hand down a single manual on coping or a tidy set of rules. They forged habits and instincts in daily life that functioned as an informal curriculum in endurance and practical emotion work. Those years taught people to tolerate ambiguity without a therapist in the room and to repair relationships without an app telling them how. This is not nostalgia. It is an argument about practice over prescription.
The classroom of everyday friction
Children who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s learned from small failures that accumulated into a rugged competence. The lessons were rarely dramatic. They were banal and persistent. Waiting three days for a letter. Getting lost with a paper map and finding the way back. Losing a role and trying again. These were not taught as lessons in emotional intelligence. They were simply how the world worked.
That steady friction mattered because it exposed people to disappointment without catastrophising it. The effect was not heroic. It was quiet. You go home. You deal with it. The raw stuff of life became familiar, and familiarity made future shocks less destabilising. There is an acquired calm in recognizing that setbacks rarely change the core of your life. That calm still shows up in phone calls to mothers at two in the morning where the crisis looks urgent and the voice on the line responds with a steady practicalness that defuses panic.
Not immunity but practice
Call it practice for being human. Repeated small demands on attention and willpower build a tolerance to stressors without ceremony. It is not about never feeling fear or sorrow. It is about those feelings being embedded in a narrative frame rather than exploding it. These generations did not always have language for distress. That absence was not the same as ignorance. Often it meant people learned to locate solutions instead of waiting for validation.
Just as the immune system must be exposed to germs children require exposure to setbacks failures shocks and stumbles in order to develop strength and self reliance.
Jonathan Haidt social psychologist New York University.
The social infrastructure that taught repair
Families and neighbourhoods in those decades were not uniformly kind or wise. Still they featured repeated face to face interactions that trained people in repair work. When someone hurt another person the chance for immediate apology and visible follow up was routine. People practiced apology and reparation because avoidance was harder than saying sorry and showing effort afterwards.
This local scaffolding matters. Without instant channels of broadcast grievance and with fewer curated identities online people were obliged to be present in relationships. Presence forced messy negotiations. Over time those negotiations accumulated into skill. I say this as an observation and as a critique of present tendencies. The trade off is real. Many contemporary levelling up efforts have been necessary. But what we have rarely recreated is the informal schooling of relational durability.
Hard edges that taught judgment
The world then offered fewer bespoke comforts. Choices were coarser. That coarseness taught judgment because consequences were harder to outsource. If you fixed the lawnmower badly it was your weekend wasted. If you missed a train you reworked the day rather than refresh an app. Consequences sharpened priorities and trained the mind to triage under pressure. It made people better at deciding what needed attention now and what would survive delay.
Why no book carried the lesson
Self help literature promises modular interventions and clear steps. The 1960s and 1970s did not package endurance into a product because resilience there was distributed. It lived in the architecture of everyday tasks and the interplay of institutions family systems and community constraints. It is hard to sell that kind of education. It does not fit on a cover. It does not come with a subheading promising quick fixes.
There is an uncomfortable implication here. Cultural practices are not neutral. Some practices teach waiting and repair. Others teach instantaneous remediation and curated identity protection. The latter can be life saving when used correctly. But it does different work and sometimes it leaves people undertrained for the slow collapse of ordinary difficulties.
Small rhythms beat big slogans
Speak two sentences and sentence length will vary. The point is this. Emotional strength in those decades came from repetition not rhetoric. It came from repeating acts of repair and recovery until they were reflexive. Short lived moral fervour and grand ideological claims did not build durable skills. Endurance was built in the banal repetition of small recoveries.
What the present borrows and what it ignores
We have inherited many kinds of progress. We have better awareness of mental health more tools and more language. But language and tools are not substitutes for habitual exposure to small manageable failure. Modern life often removes friction in ways that encourage avoidance of discomfort rather than practice with it.
That is a deliberate and opinionated claim. I am not romanticising injury or hardship. I am saying that some modes of protection can be overprotective. We would do well to borrow deliberately from older patterns the ones that trained people to persist without dramatizing every difficulty.
An invitation not an instruction
This is not a blueprint to go back to some imagined golden era. Rather it is an invitation to notice where our own lives lack the quiet, repeated curriculum of repair. Where can you allow small tolerable failures to occur so that your response repertoire grows? Think of practices small enough to be lived and repeated not celebrated.
Why this matters now
When institutions fail the people who are most able to absorb the shock are those with practice in repair and triage. That is practical. It is also political because it shapes what communities can bear and what demands they can present. Emotional resilience as a distributed skillset affects how we weather economic disruption relational breakdown and long term uncertainty.
And it shapes stories. Generations who grew up with small failures often tell less apocalyptic versions of their lives. That matters in daily conversation and in how responsibility is allocated. I find this important because public rhetoric frequently misattributes outcomes to character alone or to systemic factors alone. Practice sits between those narratives. It reminds us that habits and structures co produce competence.
Summary table
| Lesson | How it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| Distress tolerance | Frequent small setbacks without digital buffers | Makes shocks less destabilising and reduces catastrophic framing |
| Repair work | Face to face conflict resolution within local networks | Builds skills in apology negotiation and reparation |
| Judgment under constraint | Coarser choices and visible consequences | Trains triage and prioritisation under pressure |
| Practice over prescription | Learning through repetition not manuals | Creates durable reflexes rather than temporary strategies |
Frequently asked questions
Did people in the 1960s and 1970s really cope better than people today?
Not uniformly. Coping is context dependent. Many people then suffered in silence and systems failed them. The claim is narrower. On average everyday routines in those decades offered repeated exposures to manageable setbacks that trained tolerance. That training sometimes looks like better short term coping for ordinary difficulties. It is not a claim that overall mental health outcomes were superior across the board.
Is this an argument against therapy or modern mental health support?
No. Therapy and professional support are valuable and often necessary. The point is complementary. Public health and clinical services address severe distress and structural problems. What I am arguing for are cultural practices that produce baseline robustness through repeated ordinary demands. Both are useful and they operate at different scales.
Can young people today learn these skills without reverting to older social infrastructures?
Yes they can. The mechanisms are simple in idea though not always easy in practice. Provide unscripted time unmediated by constant reassurance allow tolerable risk and encourage repair oriented social interactions. Design small repeated practices that mimic the friction of those earlier decades. The aim is to create a training ground rather than a nostalgia tour.
Aren’t some of the older practices harmful or exclusionary?
Certainly. Not all past practices are worth reviving. Some were unjust or left people without necessary protections. The task is to select useful habits while rejecting harmful ones. That requires judgement. Recalling the past is not an instruction to repeat it wholesale. It is an invitation to harvest what works and discard what does not.
What should a reader do after finishing this article?
Notice a small predictable discomfort in your life that you can allow to play out without immediate digital remediation. Let it be a practice session. Try to repair a minor social conflict in person rather than via mediated channels. Repeat small exercises and observe whether your tolerance and judgement change over time. This is incremental work not a spectacle.
