The question hangs in the air at family tables and in comment threads: what did childhood in the 1960s and 1970s actually teach about responsibility. For many of us who lived through those decades the answer is messy. It was learned in stages not decrees. It arrived through small daily economies of attention and obligation … Read more
There is a stubborn truth I keep running into at dinner tables and in the comments thread of the internet. People born in the 60s and 70s tend to finish what they start. Not always. Not gloriously. But more often than those who followed them. Call it stubbornness call it thrift call it an accident … Read more
There is a slipperiness to memory. When I ask someone born in the 1960s or 1970s how they fixed things before smartphones, the answer is rarely neat. It is a story told in half sentences and the smell of engine oil or lemon soap. Nowadays the question is framed like a nostalgic puzzle. But this … Read more
There is a popular image of the generation raised in the 1960s and 1970s that cycles through our feeds like a stubborn tune. They are alternately nostalgic heroes and relics of a bygone stubbornness. Modern psychology is more careful than the snapping stereotypes. It admits patterns without pretending they explain everything. This article refuses neat … Read more
I keep meeting people who talk about their childhood like a secret training manual. They do not mean it literally. They mean the small daily frictions of the 1960s and 1970s taught them a steadiness that shows up in odd places later on a late train with a rude passenger a delayed parcel a failed … Read more
There is a quiet kind of composure I see at the bus stop on a wet Tuesday morning in Manchester. A woman born in 1972 checks her phone then folds it into her coat with a small breath as if to say not yet not now. A man from 1963 tightens his grip on his … Read more
There is a stubborn truth that nags at anyone who grew up in the 60s and 70s and watches modern parenting advice with a mixture of bafflement and fondness. That truth is not nostalgic fluff. It is a set of lived practices and frayed rituals that taught many of us how to sit with discomfort … Read more
There is a quiet sort of immunity that settles over many people who were born in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not arrogance. It is not superior coping. It is a familiar, private economy of worth that does not require the constant tally of likes or applause. This article is part observation and part … Read more
There is a stubborn, often unspoken difference in how people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s handle pressure. This is not a sentimental nod to nostalgia. It is a messy, partly biological, partly cultural pattern that shows up at meetings and family dinners and in the sudden ways someone will either fold or … Read more
There is a quiet breed of steadiness walking around the high street in Britain right now. They are the people who grew up when phones were bolted to the wall and Saturdays meant a paper round. Psychologists point out a pattern hardly discussed in polite conversation but glaringly obvious when you look closely. People born … Read more