There is a particular tone to conversations with people born in the 1960s and 1970s. It is not grandstanding. It is a practical kind of steadiness born from patchy safety nets and fewer instant fixes. Psychologists are noticing patterns in emotional habits that feel rarer in younger cohorts. This piece argues those patterns are not mere nostalgia nor a moral ranking. They are real, teachable, and worth paying attention to.
When ordinary friction becomes character work
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s did not mean living an austere life of virtue. It meant living in an era where infrastructure and social rituals forced people into durable problem solving. You learned the social choreography of apology, of standing in a long queue without rage, of writing a letter that might or might not get answered. Those repeated tiny demands are what trained certain emotional skills.
Not resilience as a slogan but as repeated practice
Clinical research uses the word resilience a lot, sometimes until it becomes a slogan. But for people whose childhoods involved ungloved exposure to risk and discomfort there was practice built into everyday life. Falling off a bike and getting up again, losing an intergenerational job and finding another, waiting a week for an appointment or a parcel — these were micro-labs for how the nervous system learns to tolerate surprise.
Jean M Twenge professor of psychology at San Diego State University has warned about how constant screen availability reshapes adolescent well being. Her point is stark and relevant. She asked Have smartphones destroyed a generation and she linked heavy smartphone use to lower happiness among teens. This is not a throwaway complaint. It illuminates a mechanism. Less unmediated friction means fewer opportunities to practise emotional recovery.
Have smartphones destroyed a generation. Jean M Twenge Professor of Psychology San Diego State University
Emotional skills that still look odd to contemporary sensibilities
These strengths are not dramatic. They are small and cumulative. They include a tolerance for boredom that is not the same as apathy. They include a social patience that tolerates messy in person conflict. They include a kind of discreet self sufficiency a refusal to outsource every discomfort to an app or a group chat.
Call it a baseline steadiness. People born in the 60s and 70s often carry an embodied assumption that discomfort passes. That assumption changes how you plan weekends and raise children and react to sudden dilution of identity by public shaming. Where a younger person might experience immediate cognitive capture by a notification and a resulting state of anxiety an older adult may notice the sensation and let it recede without a procedure. That is practice showing up as muscle memory.
Community embeddedness as a form of emotional scaffolding
Another strand: neighbourhoods and proximate networks were thicker. This did not make every life better. It did however make ordinary accountability more visible and therefore easier to navigate. If you knew the people on your street their opinions mattered in small practical ways. That accountability encouraged reputational thinking which is different from curated online identity. It is messy and imperfect but it trains you to manage social repair in real time.
Why we should stop fetishising the past and start interrogating mechanisms
There is a lazy binary in generational talk older equals wise younger equals fragile. That sells headlines but it misleads. Instead of romanticising we should isolate the mechanisms that created these emotional habits and ask whether they can be recreated intentionally. For example the simple act of scheduling regular unsupervised time for a teenager or refusing immediate fixes can be used to train tolerance. It is not mystical. It is deliberate practice. Yet social trends make deliberate practice harder to schedule.
I admit this is partially opinion. I grew up around friends who learned to fix radios household by household and I think that practical tinkering shaped how they approached failure later in life. That kind of anecdote should not replace data but it is a useful starting point for what empirical studies are now showing about technology moderation and mental health.
A cognitive economy of lesser urgency
There is another underappreciated outcome: a different allocation of attention. When entertainment and social validation are not continuous and on demand people develop the ability to steward attention over longer arcs. That yields deeper focus and sometimes better judgement. It is not universal. Plenty of people born then were anxious lonely or reckless. But the statistical tilt matters in social terms.
Not an argument against modern comforts
Do not read this as an injunction to remove smartphones or to insist on suffering. Modern technologies have created unprecedented problem solving capacities and new forms of empathy. Young people today are often more globally aware more adaptable in remote collaborations and more attuned to systemic injustices. My position is narrower. We should recognise that some emotional capacities became less common and we should consider whether we want to cultivate them deliberately alongside contemporary advantages.
That means designing environments where small frictions are not pathologised. It also means valuing face to face conflict resolution as a learned skill rather than a painful relic. We must update our social pedagogy rather than merely accept the default comforts of the present.
Where this shows up in daily life
In the office an employee who grew up in the 1970s might be unusually comfortable taking a delayed but decisive approach to a problem tolerating ambiguous instructions while mapping long term consequences. In the family these same traits translate into steadier emotional responses during crises. These are not universal nor immutable traits but they are recognisable patterns.
Importantly the traits can be taught. They do not require the exact conditions of the 60s or 70s. They require structured practice exposure to manageable uncertainty and social contexts where repair is expected rather than avoided.
Summary table
| Observed emotional strength | How it formed | Modern equivalent practice |
|---|---|---|
| Tolerance for boredom | Scarcer instantaneous stimulation and longer waits for entertainment | Scheduled device free project time and deliberate slow hobbies |
| Practical self reliance | Trial and error learning without constant expert intervention | Hands on problem solving tasks with limited outside help |
| Relational repair skills | Frequent in person interactions without digital buffers | Guided face to face conflict practice and accountability rituals |
| Distress tolerance | Exposure to small risks and fewer immediate comforts | Controlled exposure to manageable discomfort and reflection |
Frequently asked questions
Is this just generational nostalgia dressed up as science
Nostalgia is part of the conversation. But academics are also measuring cohort differences in reported anxiety attention and social behaviour. The key is not to conflate anecdote and data. Studies indicate trends not immutable laws. The strength of the argument here is in combining lived observation with research that links constant digital availability to certain mental health patterns. The real work is in translating that linkage into practical interventions rather than moralising past decades.
Can younger people develop these strengths without giving up modern technology
Yes. The mechanisms are behavioural. Intentionally creating spaces that limit immediate rewards promoting careful failure and modelling repair can cultivate similar habits. It requires discipline and design not technophobia. The point is to borrow useful training modes from the past without rejecting present benefits.
Are these traits uniformly positive
No. Some aspects of stoicism can suppress needed help seeking. Community pressure can be coercive. The older social world also included fewer recognitions of certain harms and less access to psychological support. The trick is to blend the useful with the humane accept help when needed and avoid romanticising silence about pain.
What should employers and families take away from this
Design tasks and schedules that balance immediate responsiveness with opportunities for deep work and for learning through mild challenge. Encourage face to face resolution where possible and normalise small failure as a learning mechanism. Neither punishment nor coddling produce the same benefits as structured practice.
Is there a cultural difference between countries
Yes. Local norms shape how these micro practices form. The arguments here are drawn from general patterns observed in anglophone contexts and research on technology usage. Implementation should respect local social realities and not assume one size fits all.
The past did not create saints. It created repeated situations that trained certain emotional muscles. Recognising that does not mean returning to old hardships. It means designing our present so that deliberate training in resilience patience and repair is not left to chance.
