There is a particular set of life skills that adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s tend to possess by default, and that adults who have grown up in the last two decades tend, on the available evidence, to have access to only through deliberate effort, if at all. The skills are not, in any single instance, dramatic. The skills are, more accurately, the small structural features of how those adults engage with the world, formed by particular conditions of their upbringing that the current environment no longer reliably reproduces. The conditions are gone. The skills, accordingly, are also slowly going.
I want to walk through the specific skills, because the wider cultural register has been treating the loss of them as a generic complaint about modernity, when the loss is, on close examination, considerably more specific than that. The specific lessons that have become rare are worth naming.
The capacity to be bored
The most consequential of the lost skills, on the available evidence, is the capacity to tolerate boredom. Adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s spent considerable portions of their childhoods doing nothing in particular. The doing-nothing was not, in their childhoods, a problem. The doing-nothing was, more accurately, the ordinary condition of being a child in a household that did not have continuous entertainment available. The afternoon stretched. The afternoon contained, in most cases, only what the child could produce inside it. The producing was the work the child’s mind learned to do.
The capacity that developed from this is structurally different from anything one can develop in conditions of continuous stimulation. The capacity is the ability to sit inside an unstructured period without immediately reaching for something to fill it. The capacity does not, on the available evidence, develop naturally in environments where unstructured periods are, by ambient design, almost never available. The absence of these unstructured periods affects, among other things, the development of imagination and self-regulation in ways that persist into adult life.
The skill is, on close examination, not a small one. The capacity to tolerate boredom is, in some real way, the structural foundation of almost every form of sustained internal work the adult mind is, in principle, capable of. Reading a long book. Sitting with a difficult emotion without immediately distracting from it. Working on a creative project for the period required for the project to actually develop. All of these require the underlying capacity to be in an unstimulated state without reaching for relief. The current environment has, in most cases, not installed the capacity. The current environment is, more accurately, actively eroding it. The erosion is one of the more consequential structural shifts of the last twenty years that the wider culture has not, on the available evidence, adequately reckoned with.
The capacity to be alone with one’s own thoughts
Closely related to the above, but distinct enough to warrant separate mention, is the capacity to be alone with one’s own thoughts without immediate external input. Adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s spent, by structural necessity, considerable portions of their early lives in this state. The walk home from school. The wait for a parent to pick them up. The long car ride with no music available. The various periods of solitude that the conditions of the time made unavoidable.
The condition of being alone with one’s own thoughts, repeated across enough years of childhood, produces a particular kind of internal relationship with oneself that the current environment does not reliably produce. The internal relationship is, on examination, what most adults are referring to when they describe themselves as having “a rich inner life.” The richness is not, in itself, a property of the individual. The richness is, more accurately, the cumulative result of having spent enough time alone with one’s own thoughts to have developed the capacity to find them interesting.
The adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s tend, on the available evidence, to have this capacity by default. The adults who have grown up in the last two decades tend, on the available evidence, to have it only through deliberate effort. The capacity is recoverable. The capacity is, however, harder to recover late than to develop early. The not-developing-it-early is, accordingly, a significant structural loss for the cohort that did not have the conditions for its early development.
The capacity to fix small things
The third capacity worth naming is the capacity to repair small things rather than to replace them. Adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s were, in most cases, raised in households where repair was the default response to the failure of an object. The radio that stopped working was opened up. The lamp that flickered was inspected. The bicycle that needed adjustment was adjusted. The car that needed maintenance was, in many households, maintained by the adults in the family, with the children watching and, eventually, helping.
This capacity has, on the available evidence, almost entirely disappeared. The current environment is structured around the replacement of failed objects rather than their repair. The objects themselves are, in most cases, no longer designed to be repaired. The skills that the previous generation developed by structural necessity are, accordingly, no longer required by the current environment.
What has been lost with the skill is not, primarily, the practical ability to fix things. The wider economy can, in most cases, absorb the loss of the practical ability. What has been lost, more importantly, is the underlying relationship to physical objects that the practical ability produced. The relationship was that objects were, in some real way, knowable. They were composed of parts. The parts had functions. The functions could be understood. The understanding was, in some real way, available to anyone willing to take the time to develop it. The current environment, in which most objects are sealed, proprietary, and structurally opaque, does not invite this understanding. The understanding has, accordingly, faded with the conditions that used to produce it.
The capacity to wait
Adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s waited for things in ways that are, on close examination, almost incomprehensible to anyone who has grown up in the last fifteen years. They waited for the photograph to develop. They waited for the next episode of the show to air the following week. They waited for the long-distance phone call that was scheduled for a particular hour. They waited for the mail to arrive. They waited for the various delayed gratifications of a life conducted at the pace the underlying infrastructure permitted.
The waiting produced, in the people who did it, a particular psychological feature that the wider literature has called the capacity for delayed gratification.
The capacity for delayed gratification correlates with a wide range of long-term outcomes, including financial stability, relationship quality, and overall life satisfaction. The capacity is not, on the available evidence, primarily innate. The capacity is, more accurately, developed by repeated experience of waiting in childhood, and the developed capacity persists into adult life.
The current environment provides almost no occasions for waiting in the relevant sense. Most of what one might have waited for has been engineered to be available immediately. The engineering is, in most cases, experienced by the user as an improvement. The cost of the engineering is that the underlying capacity for delayed gratification is no longer being developed in the children growing up inside it. The capacity is, accordingly, slowly disappearing from the population.
The capacity to entertain oneself with very little
The final capacity worth naming is closely related to the first two, but is specifically about the active production of one’s own entertainment from minimal materials. Adults who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s tended to develop, by structural necessity, the capacity to be entertained by very small things. A stick. A length of string. A back garden. A neighborhood with three friends and no adults. The entertainment was, in most cases, produced by the children themselves, from whatever materials happened to be available, with no external scaffolding.
The capacity that resulted is, in some real way, one of the more underrated features of how that generation engages with the world. They are, in most cases, less bored than their younger counterparts, despite having access to less continuous stimulation. They are less bored because they have, by long practice, developed the capacity to produce internal entertainment from whatever conditions happen to be in front of them. The capacity does not require external input. The capacity is, in some real way, the structural foundation of the kind of mental life that does not require the constant arrival of new content to sustain itself.
The honest acknowledgment
The honest acknowledgment, in describing these losses, is that the conditions that produced the original skills were not, in themselves, romantic. The 1960s and 1970s were not, by any honest accounting, a golden age. The conditions involved considerable hardship, including various forms of social, economic, and physical difficulty that the wider population would not, in most cases, want to return to. The skills the generation developed were, in some real way, the adaptive responses to those conditions. The conditions were not, in themselves, the point. The skills were the point.
The question for the current generation is whether the skills can be developed without the conditions. The honest answer is that they can be developed, but only through deliberate effort that the wider environment does not support. The boredom has to be scheduled. The solitude has to be protected. The repair has to be sought out. The waiting has to be artificially imposed. The self-entertainment has to be cultivated against the constant ambient pull of available alternatives. The deliberate effort is, in some real way, considerably harder than the structural acquisition was. The harder is not, on the available evidence, impossible. The harder is, more accurately, what is now required.
The skills are worth the effort. The skills are, in some real way, what most of the visible psychological stability of the older generation is, on close examination, structurally produced by. The current generation has access to many things the older generation did not. The current generation does not, by ambient default, have access to these particular skills. The gap is real. The gap is also, on the available evidence, recoverable, for anyone willing to do the deliberate work that the absent structural conditions have left as the only remaining path.
