There is a particular look in the eyes of people who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not the weary resignation of those crushed by modern pressures. Nor is it the gleam of frantic hustle. It is a steadier thing. A kind of inherited steadiness that does not always announce itself loudly but shows up in how they weather disagreements at dinner or pile two kinds of improvised repairs into a single morning and keep on talking to the neighbour. Call it resilience if you must. Psychologists now point to patterns that mean this cohort practiced emotional endurance long before it became a fashionable clinical term.
What resilience looked like before resilience was a brand
People born in the 1960s and 1970s encountered a world without infinite online validation and without the constant rewriting of identity that social media encourages. Family networks were often more local. Jobs could last a decade or more. Childrearing was rougher in sensory detail and kinder in expectation. That mix produced a kind of durable problem solving. Kids learned to fix their own disappointment because the alternatives were simply not offered.
This is not to romanticise a past that had its cruelties. It is to identify a lived training ground. Think of the small adulting crises that arrive at teenage level and become the training set for later life. When your parents insisted you apologise without seeking permission from your feelings first you practised sitting with discomfort. When there was a sudden job loss you learned inventory and improvisation. These were unsentimental lessons. They taught people to reconstruct rather than retreat.
Why cohort conditions shape psychological habits
Psychologists call these cohort effects. Shared historical conditions produce shared psychological habits that are not reducible to genetics or single life choices. The 1960s and 1970s in many parts of Britain offered a backdrop of social upheaval economic uncertainty and faster changing labour markets than people today often imagine. Those shifts forced adaptation. A generation built muscle not by design but by necessity.
There is also an emotional grammar learned in small daily interactions. Older siblings taught younger ones to take turns and to negotiate household economies. Teachers expected a certain level of decorum so children learned to delay gratification and to accept delayed recognition. Ask any person from that generation about the first time they fixed something without adult help and you will hear the same mix of pride and disbelief. It is a memory that matters because it anchored a belief in competence.
Grit is passion and perseverance for very long term goals. Angela Duckworth Professor of Psychology University of Pennsylvania.
Angela Duckworth has given us a tidy label that sits well with this cohort story. Her research on grit and perseverance helps explain why earlier life challenges can translate into reliable long term coping strategies. But labels do not capture the texture. Grit in practice looks less like a polished motivational quote and more like repeated small recoveries that become a default approach to trouble.
My own observation from the ground
I have interviewed several people born in this era and the language they use is telling. They talk less about triumph and more about continuity. They describe the quiet arithmetic of their lives. One woman who worked as a nurse in the 1980s told me about keeping a roster together when resources vanished and how that ordinary improvisation later helped her guide her children through university applications. There was no single heroic story. There was an accumulation of small courses of action that combined to make her unflappable at crucial moments.
I am explicit about my bias here. I find this cohort appealing. I am not nostalgic in an easy sense. I simply believe that some skills transfer across eras in ways modern analyses underplay. The lesson is not to tell younger people to replicate a harder childhood. That would be cruel. The point is to notice how competence grows from regular exposure to solvable difficulty and then to ask how we can design similar exposures ethically today.
Not every advantage came from adversity
We must be careful. Hardship is not a moral soup that automatically yields virtue. It yields injury as often as it yields strength. Many who lived through steeper poverty or violence carry scars that do not resolve with fortitude alone. Yet within the cohort there were numerous pockets where modest and contained hardship produced legible gains in adaptability. Those specific contexts matter. Community support neighbours who looked after each others children access to decent schooling they all functioned as scaffolding for resilience.
It helps to imagine resilience as an emergent property rather than an individual achievement. When a child sees adults who respond to setbacks with repair work and practical recalibration they internalise a way of responding. That model differs from a culture where every small upset is amplified into a crisis and then processed into a personal identity. In one case you inherit a toolkit in the other you inherit a narrative. The two are not equivalent.
What younger generations can borrow without copying the past
You do not need to live without emotional language to learn useful endurance. What matters is practice. Regular exposure to manageable challenge plus supportive reflection produces durable skills. This can be achieved with mentorship community projects meaningful responsibility at work and institutional patience from schools and employers. These are design principles not moral injunctions.
It is also worth admitting what we do not yet know. Psychologists have measured grit and correlated it with outcomes but the mechanisms are multi layered and context dependent. Structural factors such as wealth inequality and access to healthcare shape how any individual trait is expressed. And some traits prized in the 1960s and 1970s may not map neatly onto pressing 21st century problems like information overload and social fragmentation. There is no single golden recipe that transports from one era to another intact.
One inconvenient truth
Here is a thought I will state bluntly. Praising a generation for resilience risks silencing the failures of social policy that made resilience necessary. If people needed to be endlessly resourceful because the state failed to provide basic security that is not a compliment. We should admire the human response and also insist on better systems. Admiration without accountability becomes a way of excusing hardship.
So when we notice that people born in the 1960s and 1970s learned resilience before it had a name we should celebrate the observable skills and simultaneously interrogate the environments that demanded them. That double move is rarely comfortable but it is essential. We can both envy a hard earned steadiness and demand fewer tests for future generations.
How to recognise the habit in everyday life
Look for the small persistent patterns. Someone who can postpone outrage to solve a problem. Someone who can tell a practical story about an early failure and how they fixed it. Someone who treats disruption as a temporary logistics issue rather than a moral catastrophe. Those are the indicators. They are mundane as well as telling. They invite workplace managers to reconsider how they evaluate performance and invite families to consider what kinds of responsibilities they give their teenagers.
At the end of the day resilience is not a vintage item. It is a living practice. People born in the 1960s and 1970s may have had more unstructured opportunities to refine it. But it can be taught learned and made less costly. The ethical question is how to do that without manufacturing hardship as a training ground.
Summary table
| Idea | What it means |
|---|---|
| Cohort training | Shared social conditions can create common psychological habits. |
| Everyday practice | Resilience often forms through small repeated recoveries not single dramatic events. |
| Context matters | Hardship can produce skill but also harm and the presence of community scaffolding changes outcomes. |
| Ethical framing | Praise for resilience must include critique of the systems that made it necessary. |
| Transferable lessons | Manageable challenge plus support can cultivate durability without cruelty. |
FAQ
Who counts as being born in the 1960s and 1970s for this argument?
In this article the phrase refers to people born between 1960 and 1979. The point is not to treat the group as homogeneous but to trace shared experiences across a wide range of social backgrounds. Within that span you will find regional class and family differences that influence how resilience looks and who had access to protective supports.
Is resilience the same as grit or toughness?
Resilience overlaps with concepts like grit and perseverance but it is broader. It describes recovery and adaptation after disruption. Grit emphasises long term commitment to goals. Toughness can imply a blunt stoicism. Resilience includes repair and recalibration not just refusal to give up.
Does this mean younger people are less resilient?
No. Younger generations face different challenges that require new adaptations. Some traditional forms of steady coping may be rarer but other forms of nimbleness are more common. Each era produces strengths and gaps and the useful task is designing institutions that cultivate durable skills for current realities.
How should employers and educators respond?
They should design opportunities for people to practise manageable responsibility with real consequences and embed reflective feedback. This cultivates competence without replicating needless hardship. It also means valuing repair oriented problem solving rather than only dramatic success stories.
Is praising a generation for resilience harmful?
Praise becomes harmful when it is used to excuse policy failure. We can admire adaptive skills and at the same time demand better social safety nets and supports that reduce the need for perpetual improvisation.
Where can I read more about the psychological research mentioned?
Research on grit and resilience by psychologists such as Angela Duckworth and others provides a starting point. Academic journals on lifespan development cohort analysis and social psychology examine how shared conditions shape habit formation. For accessible introductions look to university research centres that publish summaries of their findings.
