There is a strange bluntness to the way people who lived through the 1960s and 1970s talk about time. They will pause in the middle of telling a story and seem surprised by a memory the way one might be surprised by a colour on a wall you had never noticed before. They do not necessarily call it mindfulness. They are not always serene. But they carry an attention that reads like refusal to turn every moment into background noise.
The odd gift of unedited attention
What I mean by living fully present is not an Instagram ready version of stillness. It is not a curated calm. It is a practice that looks messy on the page: standing at a bus stop in a rainstorm, noticing how the rain changes the smell of leather, and deciding not to scroll. The 60s and 70s gave us lots of cultural clutter but they also modelled habits that made presence plausible without turning it into a technique.
Street life then required slower senses. People were not constantly trimming attention to fit screens. Radio shows and records invited listening that hung in the air longer; conversations stretched because people had fewer interruptions. These are not nostalgic claims. They are evidence of habit structures that steered people toward noticing. Noticing, repeated, becomes shape.
Attention as a public practice
I have argued before that eras are less about fashion and more about rhythm. The 60s and 70s generated rhythms where attention was social not merely individual. Protest marches, kitchen conversations, and record shops created spaces to listen and argue and change course. Living fully present then often meant being present together in ways that required risk and a readiness to be changed.
There is a quiet arrogance in our modern idea that attention can be hacked in isolation. The lesson from those decades is humbler and more social: if you want to be present, practice it where others will notice you do it badly and keep doing it anyway.
From ritual to improvisation
One of the clearest lessons I take from the 60s and 70s is that ritual and improvisation were partners rather than enemies. People kept rites small and local. They learned songs by ear, cooked by memory, fixed radios with patient hands. Those repeated rituals did not stifle spontaneity; they made improvisation possible because skill freed attention to roam.
That is the opposite of the productivity gospel that urges us to squeeze presence into a time boxed calendar entry. Presence that is scheduled as a time slot will always be fragile. Presence that grows from competence and routine can survive the sudden, the funny, the devastating.
We practice mindfulness by remembering as best we can and with some resolve and discipline to be present in all our waking moments. Jon Kabat Zinn PhD Founder of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
This is not to flatten the spiritual lineage of such ideas into a single source. Jon Kabat Zinn named and popularised practices that began to cohere at the end of the 1970s in clinical settings. But the everyday versions of presence I am describing were already being lived out in kitchens and buses and neighbourhood pubs across Britain long before anyone labelled the activity.
Noise as a teacher
Another instructive point from those decades is the way noise functioned. Noise then was not merely a distraction to be eliminated. It was a texture that taught you how to focus. If you could hear a song over the roar of a crowd you had to train a certain ear. That training matters: being present is not just calming down inner drama. It is learning to care about some things and to let others pass without theft.
I do not romanticise. There was plenty of brutality in public life then. But even ugly friction demanded a kind of attention to the world that is rarer now because so much friction is outsourced to apps and algorithms.
What we lost and what we can borrow back
The obvious complaint is that modern life brings new pressures that previous generations did not have. That is true. But I am more interested in what we can borrow back: small democratised practices that do not require a retreat or a paid course. Borrowing back is not simulation. It is reintroducing forms of attention that can survive the smartphone.
Begin with public smallness. Show up to something without a plan to document it. Listen for twenty minutes to a neighbour without cataloguing the conversation for later use. Cultivate skillful idleness the way a mechanic keeps a soft cloth ready on the bench. These are not tricks. They are muscle work.
Presence is not the absence of wanting
Counterintuitively, presence in the 60s and 70s often leaned against desire rather than dissolving it. People wanted loudly then. They campaigned and loved and argued with hunger. Being present amplified desire and made it less performative. That is complicated. Presence, lived with appetite, is charged. It can fuel change. It also burns.
I take a non-neutral view here: modern commodified mindfulness strips that charge away in the name of comfort. We have sanitised the present into a pale interior design choice. The original, rougher present had edges. Those edges mattered.
Practical mischief
There is a mischievous lesson too. The 60s and 70s were full of experimentation and failure. People tried living cheaply, travelled without planners, attempted DIY projects and often failed spectacularly. That failure is a presence tutor. You only feel failure if you have fully inhabited the attempt. So failure trains presence better than triumphant diary entries about calm ever could.
Embrace small failures in public. Make a meal you cannot quite finish. Tell a story that falls apart mid sentence. These moments teach more about living fully present than a polished meditation app ever will.
An open ending
I will not map every road back to the present because mapping diminishes the work. Some methods must be discovered by fumbling. And that is the point. The 60s and 70s did not hand us a blueprint. They handed us modes of attention embedded in daily life. Recovering them requires patience and will and, yes, a bit of trouble.
There is no single regulatory authority that can certify a life as fully present. There is only practice, public reckoning, and the occasional song that makes you stop and realise you have been holding your breath for years.
| Idea | What it looked like then | How to try it now |
|---|---|---|
| Social attention | Long face to face conversations in cafes and at rallies. | Attend something without your phone and let interruptions happen. |
| Ritual plus improvisation | Learning songs by ear and fixing things at home. | Practice a small craft until it frees your mind to wander productively. |
| Noise training | Listening to music in crowded public spaces. | Practice listening in crowded places without recording or commenting. |
| Failure as tuition | DIY and experiments that often failed openly. | Try something publicly where failure is possible and stay through it. |
FAQ
How is the 60s and 70s approach to presence different from modern mindfulness trends?
The older approach was embedded in shared habits and social rituals rather than packaged techniques. Modern mindfulness often presents as a private remediation for stress. The 60s and 70s taught presence as a way of living with others and with risk. That means it can be louder and messier but also more consequential. The difference matters because presence as social practice sustains itself through accountability and co participation in ways private practice rarely does.
Can elements of that era be recreated in a busy modern life?
Yes but not perfectly. You can borrow forms and adapt them. Make public commitments to show up without technology for part of a meeting or a walk. Learn a practical skill that requires attention. These approximations will not recreate the exact context of earlier decades but they will cultivate similar capacities in your nervous system and social network.
Does this argument ignore inequalities that made presence easier for some people?
No. I acknowledge that social and economic privilege shaped who could afford to be present in the ways I describe. Evoking lessons from that era is not a prescription that fits everyone. It is an invitation to notice what structures supported attention then and to think politically about how to create spaces for present attention now in workplaces and communities.
Is this just nostalgia dressed up as advice?
It is partly nostalgic and knowingly so. But nostalgia can be instructive. Rather than offering an idealised past we should mine the concrete habits and failures of earlier decades. The point is not to return to a past that never existed for everyone but to recover practices that remain useful and adaptable.
How does one start without buying into commercial mindfulness?
Start with small public experiments. Make a habit of listening to someone for twenty uninterrupted minutes. Try a manual task until your hands remember the steps and your mind clears to different kinds of thought. These steps do not require purchases. They require commitment and a willingness to be observed doing something imperfectly.
That is the stubborn, slightly inconvenient gift of the 60s and 70s. Presence was not sold as comfort. It was lived as practice. If you want to live more fully present now, be prepared to be a little uncomfortable and to stay.
