There is a quiet stubbornness to people born in the 60s and 70s. It is not the stubbornness of refusal or of nostalgia. It is the stubbornness of scale. They learned to balance time on calendars made of paper and relationships measured by visits not views. So when a world obsessed with visible validation arrived, many of them looked at it sideways and kept living. This is not nostalgia for nostalgia sake. This is an argument about how value is added and subtracted in a life.
Not anti digital just anti performance metrics
I have watched friends in their sixties and late fifties get smartphones and shrug off the need for applause. They will use social apps for practical reasons to keep in touch with grandchildren or community groups yet they rarely treat an online heart as proof of worth. That is not a moral superiority claim. It is a practical calibration. Likes offer a count but not a ledger of meaning. Those born in the 60s and 70s learned to ask what a badge truly buys you in the long run.
Raised on tangible returns
The generation who came of age in the 70s and early 80s was taught to expect incremental results. You planted something and you tended it. You apprenticed and you earned a job role. The reward was not broadcast; it was owned. For many people now entering their 50s and 60s the mental economy still prefers assets that compound invisibly.
This is why the metrics of social media feel bizarre to them. A like is loud, ephemeral and cheap. Deep care is quiet, recurring and often invisible to strangers. That difference matters because it shapes decisions about privacy, about publicness and about where to invest attention.
Memory and proof are different things
There is an old-fashioned way of keeping proof that does not depend on screenshots. Photos were printed. Letters were kept in boxes. If you wanted to show someone care you handed them a thing. That formed an internal logic where evidence was private and durable rather than public and disposable. When the social feed turned proof into public theatre, people who were trained in the older craft of memory found the theatre unconvincing.
They noticed another mismatch. Social media confuses visibility with intimacy. A large following sometimes signals performance skill not deeper bonds. People born in the 60s and 70s can be deeply social and still uninterested in performing that sociality to an audience. Their default question is not how many applaud but who will be there when the plumbing breaks at three in the morning.
Emotional economies that predate algorithmic attention
Try to explain compound trust to someone who has never seen it. It accumulates in small acts repeated over decades. It resists being traded in a single post. That accumulation shaped the emotional economies of a generation whose daily lives were lived with less broadcast pressure. The presence of an algorithmic audience creates incentives to convert continuity into spectacle. That is precisely the conversion many in the 60s and 70s decline to make.
Not all of them shrug. Some fight the platform logic.
There is an active choice to resist attention as currency. Some do it because they distrust surveillance. Some do it because they were burned by early corporate promises of upward mobility. Others simply do not find the trade worth making. Whatever the motive, the reaction is not passive. It is a preference architecture built by decades of living and learning. This is where we can and should debate values instead of scolding older people for being technophobic.
Millennials have known a mix of good and bad fortune. By lottery of birth timing theyre the worlds first generation of digital natives. Adapting to new technology is hardwired into their generational DNA.
Paul Taylor Executive Vice President Pew Research Center.
Paul Taylor frames an important contrast. Being a digital native is different from being a digital refugee. Those born in the 60s and 70s are often skilled adapters rather than native users. They convert tools to ends rather than adopting tool logics wholesale.
Expert reasoning where it matters
Social scientists have pointed out that public metrics shape behaviour. The existence of a tally changes choices. But observation is not moralising. Older adults often simply prefer measures that align with stewardship and lineage rather than with virality. They value continuity.
Practical consequences, not just sentimental ones
This orientation alters consumption, career choices and political behaviour. People born in the 60s and 70s may adopt technology for work efficacy while refusing to turn private feeling into public broadcast. They often seek communities with shared obligations rather than audiences who applaud. That matters politically. It matters economically. It also reshuffles how families pass on practices for measuring success.
For younger people derided as ‘chasing likes’ the mismatch is real but not absolute. Many younger users build communities that are genuine. Yet the generational contrast is instructive: it shows that the measure of a good life is historically variable rather than universally fixed.
Personal note
I grew up in a household where a compliment was given with a wink and a cup of tea not a post. That trained me to notice how different forms of recognition shape ambition. I watch younger friends who shape their careers around attention metrics and I both admire and worry for them. Admire because attention can be converted into leverage. Worry because leverage without duplicated grounding can become brittle. This is a personal bias. It is not a universal truth.
Where this leaves us
We should stop pretending one generation owns reality. People born in the 60s and 70s are not immune to the draw of visible affirmation. Many enjoy and use social media. They are not ascetics. But their baseline metric system tends to be calibrated to resilience, to craft, to the long game. That calibration produces different anxieties and different pleasures. It also offers a corrective to an attention economy that equates public applause with moral worth.
There is an open challenge here. How do we integrate the immediacy of digital life with forms of value that resist being counted in a feed? The older generations offer prototypes. They teach us to treat reputation as long lived and private in ways the algorithm cannot easily manufacture. But they also have blind spots. They sometimes romanticise stability and overlook the real ways in which digital visibility can open doors. The conversation matters more than the verdict.
Closing thought
People born in the 60s and 70s do not measure life through likes because their measuring sticks were forged in different economies of value. That difference is not a condemnation of younger people nor is it a refusal to change. It is a reminder that measure matters and that every measuring device invites certain trades and taxes. Be mindful which ledger you choose to trust.
Summary table
| Key idea | What it means |
|---|---|
| Different value systems | Older cohorts prioritise durable obligations over public validation. |
| Practical calibration | Individuals from the 60s and 70s adopt tech for utility not performance metrics. |
| Memory economy | Private proof and long term trust trump transient likes. |
| Expert context | Research shows generational differences in digital adoption and values. |
| Open challenge | Integrating immediacy with long term value without flattening one into the other. |
FAQ
Why do some people in that age group dislike social media attention metrics?
It is less dislike and more a different internal accounting. Many individuals raised before the ubiquity of the internet learned to evaluate outcomes by duration and reliability. Public metrics encourage choices optimized for visibility rather than reliability. That pushes some people to avoid or downplay metrics that feel performative.
Does this mean they are technophobic?
No. Many embrace technology energetically for navigation banking communication and entertainment. The distinction is between using tools and letting platform incentives shape personal priorities. They can be enthusiastic users and still refuse the currency of likes as the primary measure of worth.
Can attitudes change with age?
Attitudes shift. Life events and new social contexts alter how people value visibility. A grandparent might learn to enjoy sharing moments widely after grandchildren arrive. Conversely someone who once chased applause can grow weary of it. Generational tendencies describe probabilities not iron laws.
Is there anything younger people can learn from this perspective?
Yes. Younger people might consider diversifying their measures of success. That does not mean abandoning platforms but developing parallel accounts of value that reward consistency and substance. It can be freeing to cultivate ways of knowing success that algorithms cannot replicate.
Does avoiding likes protect privacy?
Avoiding public metrics can reduce exposure but it is not a privacy panacea. Many platforms collect unseen data irrespective of public engagement. Choosing to keep more of your life off public feeds does help limit some forms of visibility based exploitation but it should be combined with mindful privacy settings and platform literacy for better protection.
