There is a quiet stubbornness in people born in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not the loud certainty of triumph or the confident pose of celebrity. It is a steadier thing a sense of who they are that predates feeds and follows and the constant performative loop of online audiences. In this piece I want to make the case that identity for that cohort was forged through practices and pressures that social media rewires rather than replaces. I will argue this not as a nostalgic cheerleader but as someone who has watched the architecture of selfhood change and sometimes crack under new loads.
Not an absence but a different scaffolding
People who came of age in the 60s and 70s lived through rites of passage unmediated by algorithmic applause. They learned to negotiate status in small local networks families neighbourhoods workplaces where reputation accumulated slowly and could not be edited into an instant highlight reel. That slower accumulation had costs but it also meant identity was often tied to repeated social acts over time not curated impressions.
Memory anchored in objects and places
There is a difference between remembering something because it appeared on your timeline and remembering because you still own the scratched vinyl the faded ticket stub the battered camera that once took a single important photograph. For many born in those decades physical artefacts served as mnemonic anchors holding together narrative fragments of a life. The sense of self was built around continuity of possessions places and repeated interactions rather than the ephemeral validations of likes and shares.
Practice over proclamation
In the absence of a public constant audience identity-making relied on practice. You learned who you were by doing the same things again and again by being dependable boring sometimes heroic in real time. That created a kind of internal verification system. Your identity was validated by the people who had to live alongside you not by strangers who might follow for a day and unfollow the next.
That does not mean deception did not exist then of course it did but the incentive structure was different. There was less reward for dramatic persona-shifts and more for consistent competency. Erratic reinventions were riskier because social networks were denser and less forgiving. You could not simply declare a new self and expect the world to follow along without friction.
Emotional literacy shaped by face to face
Emotions were learned in conversation on the phone over tea in pub booths at kitchen tables. Those messy encounters demanded skills social calibration conflict resolution the awkward but essential art of repairing relationships. You cannot practise those skills in measured 280 character bursts. The result is people who often carry durable emotional vocabularies that inform their idea of who they are.
What neuroscience says about continuity of self
We now have speaking evidence from cognitive neuroscience that identity is not solely a collage of episodic memories. A long interview transcript with Professor Daniel J Levitin a behavioural neuroscientist at McGill University shows this nuance plainly. Levitin describes how people retain temperament preferences and traits even when episodic recall fades. His reflections underline something obvious yet easily forgotten: who we are is sustained by multiple overlapping systems not a single feed.
Daniel Levitin Professor of psychology and behavioral neuroscience McGill University I think people fear losing the story of their life but there are traits tastes and patterns that persist even when memory for events is impaired.
That observation complicates neat narratives that place the internet as the sole architect of identity. If core dispositions remain even as memories blur then the experience of a generation shaped before social media will differ structurally from the generation that is forming identity inside persistent public networks.
Generational contrast is not moral judgement
I do not mean to romanticise an entire cohort. The 60s and 70s generation had blind spots hypocrisies and failures as all generations do. But recognising a difference in how people construct and maintain identity is not a moral scorecard. It is descriptive and it matters because it affects how people survive change how they grieve how they parent and how they teach the next generation to hold themselves steady.
Jean M Twenge Professor of psychology San Diego State University Born in 1995 and later they grew up with cell phones had an Instagram page before high school and do not remember a time before the internet.
Twenge’s observation about younger cohorts is blunt but useful. It highlights that for younger people the defaults of social life include constant mediated performance. For those born in the 60s and 70s the default was different so their toolkit for selfhood ends up looking different too. This difference produces friction sometimes tenderness and occasionally profound misunderstanding across age groups.
Less visibility can mean more privacy and more room for contradiction
There is a paradox. People without an always-on public record can be more enigmatic to historians yet more coherent to themselves. Privacy allows contradictory behaviours to coexist without immediate social sorting. You can be an introvert who plays in a band on weekends or a fiercely political activist with a soft private life. Those contradictions are less easy to sustain when every performance is indexed and compared.
What younger people gain and lose
Younger cohorts gain access to community solidarity creative exposure and a speed of connection impossible in earlier eras. They also inherit a world where identity is frequently commodified where attention is currency and where mistakes are archival. Older cohorts traded some of that reach for a slower process of identity formation that more often rewarded repair and humility. Neither system is morally superior both create strengths and vulnerabilities.
Practical consequences I care about
Intergenerational misunderstanding is not simply aphoristic. It matters in workplaces where reputation systems collide in performance reviews in families where public airing of disputes complicates reconciliation and in politics where movements are born on platforms and judged in real life. Recognising that people born in the 60s and 70s often carry deeply rehearsed senses of who they are helps explain why they react to online life with scepticism sometimes impatience sometimes genuine fear.
But the picture is flexible. Some born in those decades have wholeheartedly embraced social media and integrated it into existing identity scaffolds. Others refuse to use it and build full lives without it. The core point is not purity of approach; it is the existence of a different developmental path producing robust alternative architectures of selfhood.
Final restless thought
We are living through an era of overlapping technologies and traditions. The task is not to declare winners but to understand seams. People born in the 60s and 70s know who they are because their sense of self was built through repetition conversation place and objects. Social media changes the material of identity building but it does not make other ways vanish overnight. Some things recede slowly like the timbre of a familiar voice over a landline. Some things endure stubbornly like a song you can still hum in the dark.
Summary table
| Aspect | 60s and 70s Cohort | Social Media Centred Cohorts |
|---|---|---|
| Primary scaffolding | Place objects repeated social acts | Feeds algorithms public networks |
| Memory anchors | Physical artefacts and lived routines | Digital records and timelines |
| Identity validation | Close others repeated interactions | Audience attention and metrics |
| Emotional training | Face to face conflict repair | Curated disclosure and selective vulnerability |
| Strengths | Continuity resilience nuanced privacy | Rapid community access wider exposure |
FAQ
Does this mean people born in the 60s and 70s are better at identity than younger people?
No. Better is the wrong metric. They are different. The cohort I describe tends to rely on repetitive social practices and physical anchors which can produce a resilient sense of self in some contexts. Younger people often develop fluid identities suited to networked economies and creative expression across platforms. Each pattern has trade offs and each can malfunction when mismatched with external demands.
Can someone born in the 60s or 70s adapt to social media?
Of course. Many have adapted effectively and use platforms professionally and personally. Adapting is less about age and more about motivation resources and willingness to learn new social grammars. Where friction appears is often about expectations not capability older users may expect slower paced reciprocity while platforms reward rapid performative cycles.
Is this just nostalgia for an imagined past?
There is always nostalgia in any claim that something prior was more authentic. But the observations here are rooted in social mechanics not rose tinted myth. The forms of identity I describe were visible to sociologists and neuroscientists long before social media. Nostalgia may tint the prose but the patterns exist empirically in how reputations were built and how memory was anchored.
How should workplaces manage these differences?
Workplaces should avoid assuming a single default for reputation and feedback. Hybrid approaches that combine public performance metrics with private mentorship and longitudinal review better accommodate mixed cohorts. Encourage practices that recognise both visible contributions and the less flashy steady work that builds trust over time.
Will social media eventually erase older patterns of identity formation?
Not entirely. Cultural practices persist in pockets institutions and families. Technologies shift the default but do not instantly override decades of social learning. Expect gradual blending contested spaces and hybrid forms rather than sudden disappearance.
Where can I read more about the neuroscience of self and memory?
Work by cognitive neuroscientists including Daniel J Levitin explores how traits tastes and habits can persist even when episodic memory degrades. That research is a useful corrective to simplistic ideas that memory equals identity and clarifies why different developmental contexts yield different forms of selfhood.
