Call it stubbornness if you like. Call it common sense. For millions of people born in the 1960s and 1970s a particular survival skill slipped into their bones without a manual or a TED talk. It shows up in the way they repair a leaking tap at midnight, haggle over a secondhand sofa, or quietly patch a relationship before it unravels publicly. This is not nostalgia. It is a behavioural inheritance shaped by scarcity childhoods sudden technological change and social expectation. I want to name that skill and then argue it matters more now than it did then.
What I mean by survival skill
Survival skill here is not about wilderness or first aid. It is an everyday competence that allows people to keep functioning under slow pressure. It is the ability to rearrange resources and expectations so life does not fracture when something goes wrong. It is improvisation with restraint. It is not flashy. It is often invisible until you need it and then you wonder how you ever lived without learning it.
How it formed in the 60s and 70s cohort
People born in the 60s and 70s grew up in a world that shifted dramatically in a short span. Rationed attitudes from older generations met consumer boom times. Work cultures expected staying put but economies began to turn faster. Technology crept in and then leapt. Many households experienced intermittent scarcity or abrupt downgrades. Kids learned to make do because their parents did. Schooling taught literacy and arithmetic but not how to balance a family budget when the heater breaks in January. That gap is where the skill was forged.
Crucially this skill carried a moral weight. Being resourceful was admired. Not wasting was framed as dignity rather than deprivation. There was a penalty for public display of panic. So the skill evolved not only as technique but as temperament. People learned to mask strain and solve the problem when no one was looking. That habit persists.
A closer look at the skill
The skill has three interlocking parts. First is anticipatory thrift which is not frugality for virtue signalling but a practical habit of keeping spares and knowing which things can be stretched. Second is pragmatic repair which involves a kind of practical literacy a feel for materials for timing and for when to call a professional. Third is social capital management which is the knack of asking favours in ways that preserve relationships and reciprocity.
Put together they form a toolkit that is not taught formally but learned through observation repetition and small failures. You see a plumber visit once and then you fix a pipe twice yourself. You watch a neighbour mend a hem and then you do too. Learning is patchy messy idiosyncratic. That makes it hard to scale as policy but it makes it robust in practice.
Why I think this skill is a quiet advantage now
We live in an era of subscription services instant replacements and high expectations of uptime. The default for many is to outsource a problem to an app or a call centre. That solves things fast but it also erodes the low level competence that used to be common. People from the 60s and 70s frequently still have those competencies. They can stretch a budget across a month of unpredictable costs. They can rewire a plan when a job falls through. The advantage is not headline grabbing. It is the capacity to absorb shocks without calling it an emergency.
That said I am not romantic about it. Some of these behaviours hardened into pride and a refusal to seek help when it would have mattered. I have seen people postpone medical attention or refuse benefits because asking felt like weakness. The skill carries both power and cost.
Grit is sticking with your future day in and day out not just for the week not just for the month but for years. And working really hard to make that future a reality.
Dr Angela Duckworth Professor of Psychology University of Pennsylvania.
This observation from a contemporary resilience researcher helps explain how persistence became cultural muscle rather than a one off trait. It is not only perseverance for career goals. It is a day to day habit of shoring up the small things that keep larger plans afloat.
Personal notes and some imperfections
I grew up next to people like this. One neighbour could fix a radio with a bent paperclip and a calm voice. Another would repurpose jam jars into storage and fill them with receipts that later saved them from panic. I admired them but also occasionally resented the expectation that we should always be able to manage without inconvenience. The skill can be a guilt lever. You are told to cope and then shamed when you cannot.
There is another side. When services and social safety nets are frayed the skill can look like stubbornness or selfishness. A person who has learned to manage scarcity may hoard information replicate solutions and resist new collective approaches. That is a behavioural tension worth noticing.
Not everyone from the 60s and 70s has it
It is easy to generalise. Plenty of people born in those decades did not pick up the skill. Class region gender access to education and even the randomness of family dynamics all shape outcomes. The story I am telling is an emergent pattern not a rule. Still the pattern is strong enough to be recognisable when you live among different generations.
What younger generations can learn without being taught
Young people today can choose convenience but also cultivate the competence of small scale problem solving. Start with one domestic repair learn how to use basic tools. Learn to negotiate a private sale and to keep receipts. Build a network of neighbours who actually meet and occasionally exchange resources without an app as intermediary. None of these are silver bullets but they increase optionality in a way that a monthly subscription cannot replicate.
I say this as someone impatient with polished advice that assumes unlimited time and energy. This is not a checklist. It is a temperament shift that occurs slowly and unevenly. You will fail. Expect it. That is part of the training.
When the skill goes wrong
Improvisation can become a refusal to plan. Resourceful people sometimes underinsure key risks because they rely on their ability to fix things. That trade off is tactical not moral. It works sometimes and fails spectacularly other times. I have seen both outcomes. The lesson is to combine the old competence with modern risk thinking. Keep the practical muscle but respect the value of delegation when the stakes are large.
How communities change when the skill disappears
Communities with fewer people who can patch a life are more brittle. Their repairs take longer cost more and require external intervention. That is why a decline in informal competence is socially consequential. It is not merely nostalgic to miss a neighbour who knows how to fix a fence. It is noticing that the social infrastructure of everyday resilience has eroded and that matters.
Closing thought
The survival skill people born in the 60s and 70s developed without being taught is an incremental craft of adaptation. It is a mix of anticipation repair and social finesse. Some of it was born of necessity some of it of ethos. It is not perfect. It can be constraining and it can be sublime. But noticing it helps us choose what to pass on and what to leave behind.
| Key Idea | Why It Matters |
|---|---|
| Anticipatory thrift | Keeps households solvent through small shocks and reduces panic responses. |
| Pragmatic repair | Extends lifespan of goods reduces waste and preserves agency over time. |
| Social capital management | Maintains reciprocity and access to informal help when formal systems fail. |
| Pain points | Can produce refusal of help and risk underestimation leading to larger failures. |
FAQ
What exactly is the survival skill people born in the 60s and 70s developed?
It is a practical temperament combining forward planning repairing things yourself and managing social networks so that when problems arise you can cope without immediate external rescue. Think of it as low level resilience that prevents small problems from becoming crises. It is learned through experience observation and cultural expectation rather than formal training.
Is this skill unique to that generation?
No. Older generations certainly displayed versions of it and many younger people also develop it especially in lower income communities. What is notable is how common it was among people born in the 60s and 70s because of the specific economic technological and social transitions they lived through. The commonness created shared norms which made the skill feel generational.
Can younger people learn it quickly?
Learning is uneven. Some technical elements can be picked up quickly like basic plumbing or negotiation skills. The deeper part of the skill which involves judgement and social tact takes time and failures to mature. The fastest route is practice with permission to fail and a community where knowledge is shared rather than hoarded.
Does relying on this skill lead to negative outcomes?
Sometimes. People who over rely on personal resourcefulness may underuse support systems or delay necessary professional help. They may also accumulate invisible burdens by refusing to delegate. The remedy is balance. Keep the competence but pair it with realistic assessment of risk and willingness to seek help when stakes exceed personal utility.
How should communities preserve useful parts of this skill?
Communities can preserve it by encouraging skill sharing repair cafes and neighbour networks where practical knowledge is exchanged. Local libraries and community centres can host hands on sessions. But cultural messaging matters too. We should value practical knowledge without shaming those who need assistance.
Where can I read more about resilience and persistence?
There is a body of psychological research on grit and persistence which explores how long term effort shapes outcomes. For a readable account of this research see work by Dr Angela Duckworth Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania who has written extensively about sustained effort and character development.
