There is a simple stubbornness to the world the 70s generation grew up in. Their lives were threaded with particular absences that we now call luxuries. Back then you could plan a weekend without checking a screen, lose an afternoon in a park and not feel obliged to narrate it, and trust that a conversation ended when people left the room. Those omissions shaped character. Today’s generation fills those blanks with systems we barely notice until they fail.
The comfort they never bought
The 70s did not seek immediate confirmation from strangers. They were content with deferred feedback. The idea of a feed that demands constant input would have appeared faintly absurd. And yet, what seems like indulgent patience to them now looks like a missing safety net to many of us. We have made immediacy into infrastructure. We rely on instant maps for routes we once learned by heart. We rely on messaging apps for tone that used to be read in posture and interruption. This reliance changes what we value in people and in ourselves.
Why dependence sneaks up
Dependency grows quietly. It is less about being forced and more about convenience rearranging the daily economy of attention. The shift is not merely technological. It is cognitive. When a tool reliably answers a question, the practiced habit of asking diminishes. A teenager today may never have needed to estimate travel time without a live tracker; their sense of timing is now mediated. That matters because timing is a kind of honesty with the world. Lose it and you lose a particular honesty with other people.
What the 70s could afford emotionally
People of that era tolerated ambiguity in others more readily. If you missed a friend’s call there was no accusation waiting on the other end. That tolerance is not always noble; it sometimes masked slow emotional estrangement. Still, the consequence was a sturdier capacity to sit with unresolved things. Today’s generation expects updates, pictures, emoji. The constant stream lets us stay connected but it makes disconnection feel like a failure rather than a pause.
A concession disguised as progress
I am not arguing for a return to telephone landlines or for ritualized pen pals. The point is that many of the conveniences we celebrate also privatize patience. Instant responses have become a metric of care. When someone delays you invents reasons — and those reasons are often personal. That impulse erodes trust slowly. I find this quietly corrosive.
Tools they didn’t have that we can’t stop using
There are three structural things the 70s generation largely avoided. First, perpetual public performance. Second, algorithms deciding the salience of everyday information. Third, ambient surveillance through building-level sensors and always-listening devices. Today these are normalised. We have outsourced judgment to systems that value engagement above nuance. This is not purely a technological toxicology. It is cultural. We have accepted intermediaries between our attention and the world, and the intermediaries have preferences that are not ours.
The social price of algorithmic taste
Algorithms democratise discovery on one hand and concentrate attention on the other. What that concentration does is flatten curiosity into predictability. If you grew up in the 70s you wandered across pages, records, ideas because there was no immediate recommendation engineering your choice. Today’s generation wanders less by accident and more by design. And design narrows what counts as discovery.
When help became dependency
We celebrate convenience but we hardly talk about the skills we surrendered in return. Navigation, longform memory, face-to-face conflict resolution — these are not fashionable skills anymore but they are extinct in clusters. The 70s did not require constant moderation of identity. Identity was less curated because the platforms that demand curation did not exist. That absence produced a kind of messy authenticity. It was flawed but robust in ways the polished present sometimes is not.
It is not an exaggeration to describe iGen as being on the brink of the worst mental health crisis in decades. Much of this deterioration can be traced to their phones. Dr Jean M. Twenge Professor of Psychology San Diego State University
The quote lands because it comes from longform study not a viral hot take. Jean Twenge’s observation gives teeth to a pattern we sense: the device that frees also fences. I use this citation sparingly because we cannot reduce social change to one cause. Yet there is an obvious link between the scale of instantaneous social comparison and a shift in how young people feel about themselves.
Small rebellions the 70s never needed to stage
Back then, privacy was the default. You had to be intentionally public. Now you have to be intentionally private. That inversion is both subtle and profound. Anyone trying to live with less visibility will find themselves making tactical choices. Those choices read to others as eccentricities or moral fussiness. The 70s had less reason to value such tactics. They could err in private and repair in private. Today the repair often requires public performance of regret or contrition. The stage consumes nuance.
Personal truth vs curated truth
We mistake curated white space for authenticity. Many influencers are craftsmen of vulnerability and many are not. The 70s generation had fewer platforms to commodify sorrow. There was less incentive to refine heartbreak into content. The result: their interior chaos rarely earned an audience. For better or worse, we now submit interiority to metrics and call it connection.
What we ought to salvage
We should not romanticise scarcity. The conveniences are meaningful. But we should insist on a different bargain with them. Learn to navigate without live directions sometimes. Leave a screen off for long stretches. Teach younger people to persist through slow answers. That is not a nostalgic checklist. It is a practical counterweight — a training regimen for attention. Instead of mourning what the 70s lacked we can be intentional about what we choose not to add into our lives.
Some of this is personal preference. Some will look like performative austerity. I don’t care. We need small collective experiments where a neighbourhood agrees to fewer push notifications, or a workplace that asks people to wait on replies. Institutions can set norms that are not optimised for engagement metrics. That would be unusually bold.
Conclusion
The 70s generation didn’t need constant updates because their world functioned with larger gaps and slower rhythms. Today’s generation depends on fills that close those gaps but also change the shape of desire, attention, and social trust. That dependence is not merely technical. It is moral and civic because it reorganises how we relate to one another. We are allowed to be builders of that architecture. The question is: will we keep designing for speed or for something that lasts?
| Key Idea | What Changed | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Deferred feedback | From patience to instant responses | Affects trust and expectation in relationships |
| Algorithmic curation | From serendipity to designed discovery | Reduces breadth of curiosity and flattens taste |
| Privacy inversion | From default privacy to default visibility | Alters how identity and repair are performed |
| Skill surrender | From practiced navigation to tool dependence | Changes practical competence and resilience |
FAQ
Why compare the 70s generation with today at all?
Comparisons reveal not virtue scores but trade offs. Each era constructs habits according to the constraints and tools available. The 70s offer a contrast because they reveal what happens when certain conveniences are absent. That contrast helps us examine which conveniences produce net gain and which quietly shift capacities we value.
Is dependency on devices all negative?
No. Devices enable learning at scale, provide communities across distance and let people who would otherwise be isolated find one another. The critique is specific not total. It is about shape not eulogy. Recognising harms does not mean abandoning benefits; it means designing limits and norms that preserve both utility and autonomy.
Can institutions reverse these dependencies?
Institutions can alter incentives. Workplaces can stop expecting instant replies. Schools can teach navigational and memory skills alongside coding. Local governments can plan for fewer surveillance defaults. These are not techno fantasies. They require policy choices and cultural courage which are harder than product updates but far more consequential.
What practical steps can individuals take?
Start small and be stubborn. Schedule device free evenings. Use navigation apps selectively. Practice meeting people without preparing content for later sharing. These are not cures but muscle training for attention. If multiple people in a social circle do this simultaneously it reshapes expectations in ways single acts cannot.
Will younger people accept slower rhythms?
Some will and some will not. Cultures are mixtures. There will be pockets that retreat into curated slowness and pockets that embrace maximum speed. Both are valid. The intervention is to make slowness a real choice rather than an impossible minority stance. That requires visible models and institutional signals that slower options are legitimate.
