There is a quiet arrogance to our age when we assume complexity is progress. We spend hours calibrating our lives with apps mood trackers timers and curated routines yet most of this frantic fine tuning would have looked unnecessary or even odd to someone who came of age in the 1970s. The 70s generation did something different. They accepted a certain kind of uncertainty and left it alone. That one thing they did not overthink was how much of their time and attention to protect with ritual or technology. We have since weaponised attention into a perpetual project. This is a piece about that loss and why it matters.
They kept attention simple not sacred
Walk into a 1970s living room in your head. The radio. A newspaper. A single appointment book with scrawled pencilled notes. Attention was a household resource not a portfolio to be optimised. There was friction and that friction functioned as a gatekeeper. You could not be constantly available because nothing made that possible. That absence of availability created a natural limit on small urgent demands of the day. You were allowed to be absent without shame.
We turned absence into failure
Now absence feels like omission. A missed message becomes a personal shortcoming. A delayed reply signals indifference. We have built systems so that the default is immediate response. Then we punish ourselves for not meeting that impossible default. The 70s generation did not treat attention as an achievement to flaunt. They did not design lives around showing they were busy. They were busy but they rarely had to prove it every minute. That is the single habit we could learn from them: the humility of not broadcasting every fragment of your attention.
Why this difference is not nostalgia
I am not advocating for moralising or pretending everything about the 70s was better. The era had its own rigidities and blind spots. But the cultural relationship to attention was different in ways that matter for how we live now. The 70s generation tolerated slow time. They accepted that some things would be resolved over weeks not minutes. That tolerance functioned like a public good. We tore that fabric apart with constant connectivity and then we wondered why our patience frayed.
Puberty is this incredibly important sensitive period in which the brain is rewired very rapidly for locking down into an adult pattern.
That quote matters here because Haidt locates early life as a critical window for attention shaping. But attention is shaped across the lifespan. The 70s way of living kept certain developmental and relational rhythms intact that our current culture undermines. The stakes are not only about productivity they are about what kind of people we become when we never let our minds rest from optimisation.
Not overthinking does not mean not caring
The popular misunderstanding is that people who do not obsess over attention are careless. That is false. The 70s generation made choices but they did not micromanage the scaffolding of daily life. They prioritised a narrower set of deliberate rituals — a family dinner a walk to the shops a weekly pub visit — instead of atomising presence into measurable chunks. Those rituals worked because they were coarse grained and forgiving. They allowed improvisation without guilt. We replaced that with hypervisible signals of intention and then got addicted to the dopamine of being seen to intend.
Anything that’s done with a screen texting social media TV online computer games all of those are correlated with lower happiness.
Twenge is blunt and sometimes contested but her point intersects with this piece: the way we fold attention into screens changes how we feel. If attention is constantly parceled out to satisfy invisible audiences our interior life becomes fragmented. The 70s generation had a different baseline for social validation. They were validated through presence not performance.
Practical consequences we rarely talk about
First consequence. Decision fatigue is not merely psychological trade it is structural. We now face thousands of tiny choices about when to be visible how to present moods when to engage with content. Each of these choices consumes a bit of bandwidth. Second consequence. Memory and narrative formation suffer. Fragmented attention creates patchwork memories. People in their seventies often report richer continuous recollections of ordinary days precisely because their attention was less fungible. Third consequence. Collective patience erodes. Civic conversations require slow attention. Speed wins the algorithm and nuance loses.
There is an emotional toll
I have watched friends design their days around the fear of missing out on micro validations. They trade deep satisfaction for the constant soft applause of notifications. The 70s generation accepted a different risk profile. They took social absence for granted and often built deeper in-person ties as a result. Not everyone then lived better but many lost less.
How to borrow their one habit without pretending to be them
Begin by acknowledging you cannot reclaim time you never had. The project is not revivalism. It is selective adoption. Start with fewer default channels. Make silence a design choice not a punishment. Allow one hour a day of deliberate unmonitored attention. Let boredom breathe. Resist the urge to document it. The goal is not moral purity. It is to create a scaffold where presence is habitual and validation is private.
Resist performance driven presence
Social media rewards demonstrable busyness and penalises quiet consistency. We have bought a system that treats attention like evidence of worth. That incentive structure is the problem. The 70s generation was not immune to status games but those games were less instantaneous. Removing the urgency of constant proof gives room for steady unglamorous work which in my experience yields better results and less existential noise.
Something to leave open
I do not have a blueprint that restores 1970s attention wholesale. It would be both impossible and undesirable. Technology brings benefits that generations before could not imagine. The question is more modest: how do we stop treating attention as a consumable performance metric and more as a stewarded resource. That requires cultural change not just individual discipline. It requires redesigning workplaces schools and public norms so absence is not a liability. The 70s generation had structural limits that protected them inadvertently. We could do the same intentionally.
Perhaps the most honest admission is that once you understand the difference you realise how much of modern disquiet is self inflicted. Knowing that is not relief and it is not condemnation either. It is a starting point. You will still make mistakes. You will still check your phone more than you planned to. But the alternative is to keep polishing an attention economy that rewards visibility over depth. That is a bad bargain for most of us.
Summary table
| Aspect | 70s Generation Approach | Modern Approach |
|---|---|---|
| Default availability | Limited and accepted | Always on and performative |
| Validation | Presence and in person ties | Microaudiences and metrics |
| Attention governance | Structural friction | Personal optimisation tools |
| Memory shape | Coherent continuous recollection | Fragmented episodic recall |
| Cultural fix | Slow rhythms and rituals | Speed and instant feedback |
FAQ
Why single out the 70s generation rather than earlier decades
The 70s are useful because they straddle analogue modernity and the expansion of mass media without the conditions of continuous personal connectivity. Earlier eras had different constraints like slower travel or harsher economic realities. The 70s offer a clear cultural contrast for many Western societies where postwar stability allowed domestic rituals to flourish without constant external interruption.
Is this argument just nostalgia for simpler times
Not entirely. Nostalgia seduces but the argument here is empirical and functional. It says certain default design features of past lives protected attention. Those protective features can be recreated selectively. The point is practical not purely sentimental. I am not saying the past was universally better only that one particular habit around attention is worth reclaiming.
Won’t stepping back from constant visibility harm my career
It depends on the role and industry. Some careers reward constant visibility more than others. But even in visibility oriented fields sustainable performance often stems from depth not constant broadcast. Short bursts of strategic presence combined with long stretches of concentrated work tend to outperform perpetual low level activity. The risk is more about optics than productivity and optics can be managed intentionally.
How do we scale cultural changes so absence is not penalised
Institutional change matters. Workplaces schools and platforms can set norms for response times quiet hours and asynchronous collaboration. Public policy could support these shifts indirectly by recognising predictable offline windows. Culture moves slowly but it shifts when alternatives demonstrate better outcomes. Small institutional experiments build proof and then norms follow.
Are there any benefits the 70s approach would lose
Certainly. The decoupling afforded by continuous connectivity also brought unprecedented access to information and social networks that help marginalised groups. The aim is not to recreate an analogue world but to choose which benefits to keep and which harms to reduce. Trade offs exist and they must be acknowledged openly.
