I have a close friend whose mother is in her late seventies. She grew up in rural Victoria in the 1950s, one of five kids, father who worked the land, no central heating, no money to speak of. When something goes wrong in her life now, and things still go wrong, she does not spiral. She does not require extensive processing time. She absorbs it, adjusts her posture slightly, and gets on. Not in a suppressed, brittle way. In a way that looks, from the inside, like something is genuinely working that is not working in most of the people I know who are forty years younger.
I have been trying to understand what that is for a long time. And I do not think it is stoicism in the dismissive sense, the push-your-feelings-down sense. I think it is something more structural than that. I think it is a relationship with discomfort that was built early, repeatedly, in conditions that no longer exist, through a process that nobody planned and nobody can easily recreate.
Psychology has a name for what she is carrying. It is called distress tolerance. And the research on how it develops says something that the generational conversation almost never acknowledges.
What distress tolerance actually is
In 2010, psychologists Teresa Leyro, Michael Zvolensky, and Amit Bernstein published a comprehensive review of the distress tolerance literature in Psychological Bulletin. Their review defined distress tolerance as the perceived and actual capacity to withstand negative emotional or physical states without needing to escape or resolve them. It is not the absence of distress. It is the ability to remain functional in its presence without the distress overriding everything else.
Critically, the review treats distress tolerance not as a fixed trait but as a multidimensional capacity that varies between individuals and across situations. Experience may shape it, and the idea that getting through discomfort changes a person’s relationship to discomfort is a plausible reading of that literature. It is not the same as showing that exposure to distress reliably trains the nervous system or produces resilience.
People born during the postwar baby boom lived very different lives from one another, and the distress-tolerance literature does not test a generation-wide effect. The narrower point is that an era offering fewer alternatives to discomfort is one in which discomfort was more often simply walked through.
The world that built them
The baby boomers were born into a postwar culture shaped by parents who had survived, in many cases literally survived, extraordinary hardship. The Depression. The war. Scarcity that was not metaphorical. Their parents communicated a particular set of rules about how to handle difficulty: quietly, functionally, without making it the center of the room. This was not always emotionally healthy. There are real costs to that framework, and those costs have been paid across decades in strained relationships, unexpressed grief, and emotional distances that were never closed.
But alongside those costs, that parenting environment deposited something. Children who grew up in households where discomfort was normalized, where hardship was treated as an ordinary feature of life rather than an emergency requiring intervention, developed a different baseline expectation about what life contained. They were not protected from difficulty. They were walked through it, repeatedly, until the walking became a reflex.
Experts who spoke with Newsweek about boomer resilience noted that growing up in a post-World War II era defined by necessity rather than comfort produced traits that now look unusual against a cultural backdrop where emotional difficulty is more often treated as something to be managed, medicated, or processed rather than simply endured. The observation is not that boomers are better people. It is that they were trained by a different environment, and the training left specific marks.
The Kauai study and what it found
The most rigorous long-term evidence for how adversity shapes resilience comes from developmental psychologist Emmy Werner’s landmark work, which followed a cohort of 698 children born on the Hawaiian island of Kauai in 1955, tracking them across four decades. The findings, published in a series of studies including a major summary in Development and Psychopathology, were foundational to the modern psychology of resilience.
Werner found that among children classified as high-risk because of poverty, family instability, or other serious adversities, roughly one third went on to develop into competent, well-adjusted adults. The protective factors she identified were about supportive relationships, temperament, and wider opportunity rather than about the hardship itself. Her work does not show that adversity built the capacity, and it says nothing about differences between generations.
This is the mechanism that the cultural conversation about boomer resilience tends to miss. The observation is not that they suffered more than subsequent generations. It is that the suffering was more often normalized and expected, and that familiarity with difficulty is one plausible reading of what accumulated. Not invincibility. Just familiarity with the fact that difficult things end.
What got lost in translation
The boomer generation raised their own children in a different context. Better resourced, more psychologically informed, more aware of childhood needs. The parenting genuinely improved in many ways. Whether greater protection from ordinary discomfort leaves the nervous system with less practice at weathering it is an intuitive idea. It is not something the research cited here tested.
This does not mean younger generations are weak, and it does not establish a capacity gap between generations. The studies cited here do not compare cohorts, and they do not show that parents removing ordinary discomfort lowered anyone’s distress tolerance.
What treating discomfort like weather actually means
I think about this on my morning runs along the river. There are mornings when it is already thirty degrees at six in the morning and the humidity makes every breath thick and the run is uncomfortable from the first step. I could negotiate with it. I could decide that the conditions make it reasonable to stop. Or I can treat it like weather, the way the city around me treats it, the way my wife’s generation treats almost everything that is simply the texture of life here, and just keep moving.
The run is better when I do not negotiate with it. Not because the discomfort disappears, but because the energy I would have spent on negotiating becomes available for the running. This is the practical upside of the boomer relationship to difficulty that gets lost when the conversation turns into generational point-scoring. It is not about suppressing feeling. It is about not treating every uncomfortable feeling as a problem that requires resolution before you can continue.
Buddhism describes a form of this in the concept of khanti, patient endurance, which is one of the ten perfections in the Pali tradition. It is not the same as passivity or the grinding down of one’s sensitivity. It is the capacity to remain equanimous in the presence of difficulty, to let it pass through rather than colliding with it at full force. The generation that walked through discomfort because they had no alternative learned something like this, imperfectly and often at real emotional cost. But they learned it. I write about how to develop this quality deliberately, rather than by accident, in my book Hidden Secrets of Buddhism.
The goal is not to become someone who does not feel difficulty. It is to become someone for whom difficulty is familiar enough that it does not require negotiation every time it arrives. That is what the most unfazed people carry. Not toughness. History.
