There is a persistent quiet among people who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not silence born of shame. It is a kind of private patience that looks like restraint to younger eyes hungry for likes. This generation often prefers the slow work of keeping parts of life to themselves rather than performing for public consumption. That preference is not mere nostalgia. It is an attitude shaped by technological shifts social ruptures and a hard learned sense that visibility is a currency with rising interest and rising costs.
Why this feels different from the social media era
People born in the 1960s and 1970s experienced adulthood without constant digital surveillance. They navigated relationships careers and public life in settings where information leaked slowly if at all. Mistakes did not follow you forever because they could not be photographed minutes later and pushed into an algorithmic timeline. That absence did not make them naive. It taught a habit: measure first reveal later.
Not anti social just selectively social
There is a tendency in cultural commentary to collapse privacy into anti social behaviour. But in conversations with neighbours at local pubs community meetings and workplaces this cohort showed up steadily. They were visible in flesh and voice yet suspicious of broadcast intimacy. The priorities were different. Reputation still mattered but reputation was judged on deeds and continuity not on curated snapshots. Approval could be earned and lost face to face and then mended face to face. That rhythm breeds a taste for privacy because privacy protects repair mechanisms that networks of ephemeral commentary cannot.
History left an imprint
Political events of the late twentieth century also shaped how a generation thinks about information. For many the memory of state surveillance civil unrest and news cycles that could be either heroic or lethal made discretion a virtue. The idea that some information could be appropriated by institutions and turned into leverage or propaganda was not abstract. It had been seen in tribunals in state rooms and on broadcasting desks. So discretion was learned as both personal armor and civic strategy.
Economic logic taught by companies and markets
In recent decades the monetisation of data has turned personal details into commodities. That dynamic is a rude shock to someone raised when advertising was limited to billboards radio and occasionally intrusive direct mail. The modern model of continuous behavioural surveillance feels like theft to older sensibilities because the transaction is invisible. When tech companies harvest attention and sell predictions many people who remember a different bargain react by retreating. It is less about Luddite reflex and more about closing the window on a market that rewrites its terms without consent.
In surveillance capitalism rights are taken from us without our knowledge understanding or consent and used to create products designed to predict our behavior.
Shoshana Zuboff Wilson Professor Emerita Harvard Business School.
The observation above from Shoshana Zuboff captures a structural outrage that older adults feel but do not always frame in economic jargon. To them the extraction of behavioural patterns from everyday life reads as an ethical violation against autonomy. When someone they know who is now in their fifties or sixties says I will not put that on social media they often mean something larger. They are closing an avenue where their personhood might be quantified and resold.
Memory economy versus attention economy
Another reason this generation prizes privacy is a different relationship with memory. Their archives are physical photo albums letters ticket stubs and the occasional printout. Those objects age and are intimate by default. The new world invites continuous documentation and external storage where memories are often compressed into metadata. Older adults resist that compression. It is not Luddism. It is a defence of texture and particularity. When your life is not an always on feed each recollection stays richer in specific contexts.
Personal identity and control
There is a moral bent here too. For many who grew up before the internet personality was not a product to be optimized. Identity had slack. People could shift careers migrate to new towns and reinvent themselves without the full weight of a searchable past pressing down on choices. That possibility of reinvention becomes a reason to guard personal data. Why give away the raw materials of future self construction to firms and publics that will use them to pin you down?
Practical privacy habits that persist
Look closely and you will see patterns in how people from the 1960s and 1970s manage information. They default to private channels for sensitive talk. They prefer small gatherings to mass posts. They will handwrite notes and save them. They place limits on children s screen time long before those same children ask for more privacy themselves. These are practices not slogans. They are embodied dispositions handed down in households and communities.
They are not uniformly conservative
It is important to be clear. Valuing privacy is not synonymous with political conservatism. There are privacy champions across the ideological spectrum and critics who want to be entirely transparent for reasons that vary. Older privacy advocates often combine a mistrust of surveillance with an appetite for public engagement that is less performative and more structural. They will sign petitions attend council meetings and lobby for regulation while declining to post daily breakfast photos.
What younger people might misunderstand
Young adults raised online often interpret restraint as aloofness or fear of missing out. That is a shallow read. The older generation s privacy serves a function. It preserves ambiguity. It preserves the right to change your mind. It preserves the possibility of failing in private and learning in private. In a culture that prizes visibility as validation that ambiguity looks like rubble. But rubble can be where repair begins.
Not opposition to connection
The reality is these people value connection intensely. Their networks are often deep loyal and slow burning. They invest in relationships that do not rely on the architecture of platforms. They will teach children to value trust over spectacle. They will prefer a phone call after a silence rather than a public post to explain one s absence. That difference is revealing. It asks us to consider whether the current incentives for visibility actually improve social life or simply monetize it.
What this means for society
The habits of one generation create counterweights. A culture that includes people who insist on private spaces pressures institutions to be more transparent and accountable. If an entire cohort is willing to withhold supply from behavioural markets that can slow data driven business models or at least complicate them. And privately kept practices like letter writing local meetings or reserved radio listening preserve social forms that repair networks need. That is not romanticising the past. It is acknowledging that we build futures with pieces salvaged from older practice.
In short this is less about hiding and more about stewardship. People born in the 1960s and 1970s are simply less inclined to outsource the curation of their lives to strangers algorithms and corporate balance sheets. They bristle when transparency is demanded as transactional proof of worth. They trade in the quieter currency of presence trust and continuance. Those are not old fashioned values. They are stubbornly useful ones.
Closing thought
There is room for both styles of public life. Young creators and their hunger for attention are not wrong. Older guardians of privacy are not prudish. The cultural conversation will be richer if we stop treating privacy as a relic and instead see it as a living technique for living with others. That technique is worth learning even if you plan to post a lot tomorrow. The choice to reveal should remain that a choice and not an economic default.
Summary
| Key idea | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Generational context | Formative years before pervasive surveillance shape durable habits of discretion. |
| Historical memory | Political and social events taught caution about visibility and data misuse. |
| Economic awareness | Data monetisation feels like an ethical violation to those who remember different market norms. |
| Memory and identity | Non digital archives preserve nuance and leave space for reinvention. |
| Civic function | Privacy practices sustain forms of repair community and accountability. |
FAQ
Why do some older adults avoid social media entirely?
Avoidance often springs from a cost benefit calculation. The perceived social returns of posting are lower than the perceived costs of persistent visibility. For many the upside of immediate likes does not substitute for the downside of having a searchable record that can be misused. This calculation also includes time and emotional labour. Managing a public persona requires constant attention and older adults often prefer to invest that attention into existing relationships rather than platform driven audiences.
Is privacy preference the same across all people born in these decades?
No. There is variation by personality profession culture and region. But there are statistically noticeable tendencies. People in these cohorts who worked in institutions that demanded discretion like diplomacy law or certain public services often double down on privacy. Others who embraced early tech careers may adopt mixed approaches. The point is patterns exist without erasing individual differences.
Can younger people learn privacy habits from older generations?
Yes. Practical habits like keeping separate channels for sensitive talk limiting geotagging choosing ephemeral messaging and valuing offline repair are transferable. But the lesson is not purely tactical. It is also moral. Learning to treat certain experiences as private helps preserve future options and limits the digital economy s appetite for predicting and shaping behaviour.
Do these privacy habits harm transparency around public issues?
Not necessarily. There is a distinction between privacy as personal discretion and opacity in institutions. Protecting private life does not preclude demanding transparency from power. In fact valuing privacy can strengthen accountability because it forces scrutiny onto institutions rather than onto individuals. The danger comes when privacy is weaponised to shield wrongdoing. That is a separate social challenge requiring law and civic action.
How do these preferences affect family dynamics across generations?
They can create tension. Younger family members may regard older relatives as old fashioned or aloof while elders may see younger kin as reckless. The productive approach is negotiation. Families that agree on boundaries around children s images group chat policies and what gets posted publicly generally navigate these differences better. Respecting one anothers defaults about disclosure helps reduce conflict and preserve intimacy.
