if you grew up in the 60s or 70s, you learned these 10 resilience-building habits without realizing it

My grandmother raised four kids on a teacher's salary during the 70s, and I've always been fascinated by how she managed it. No therapy apps. No self-help podcasts. No five-year plans written in bullet journals.

Just life, happening in real time, with all its messiness.

She figured it out because she had to. And in doing so, she built a kind of resilience that seems almost foreign today.

If you grew up during the 60s or 70s, you learned certain habits without anyone sitting you down for a lesson. These weren't conscious choices.

They were just how things worked. And looking back, many of these habits built something we're desperately trying to reclaim now: the ability to bounce back.

1) You learned to be bored

There was no algorithm serving you content every three seconds. No infinite scroll. No next episode starting in five, four, three...

You had to sit with yourself. And yeah, it was uncomfortable sometimes.

But here's what happens when you're forced to be bored: your brain starts making its own entertainment. You daydream. You notice things. You develop an inner world that doesn't need constant external stimulation.

I see this with my nephew now. Give him five minutes without a screen and he acts like he's been sent to solitary confinement. Meanwhile, kids in the 70s spent entire Saturday afternoons staring at clouds and somehow survived.

That tolerance for boredom? It's actually tolerance for discomfort. And discomfort tolerance is the foundation of resilience.

2) You experienced natural consequences

Parents weren't hovering with knee pads and participation trophies. You climbed the tree, you might fall out of the tree. You forgot your homework, you got a zero.

The world had edges, and you learned where they were by bumping into them.

This wasn't neglect. It was trust. Trust that you'd figure it out, learn from it, and be stronger for it.

Today we call this "experiencing failure in a safe environment," and we pay therapists to help us get comfortable with it. Back then, it was just called Tuesday.

When consequences are natural and immediate, you develop an internal feedback system. You learn to assess risk, make adjustments, and move forward. That's resilience in action.

3) You spent time outside, unsupervised

"Be home when the streetlights come on" was the extent of the safety briefing.

You and your friends would disappear for hours. Building forts. Exploring the neighborhood. Getting into minor trouble and figuring out how to get out of it without calling mom.

The research on this is pretty clear: unstructured outdoor play develops problem-solving skills, emotional regulation, and social adaptability. All the things resilient people need.

But more than that, it taught you that you could handle yourself. That you didn't need an adult to referee every interaction or solve every problem. You had agency.

4) You learned to wait for things

Want to hear a song? Wait for it to come on the radio. Or save your allowance for weeks to buy the album.

Want to talk to your friend? Call their house and hope they're home. If not, try again later.

Everything took time. And you learned that wanting something right now and actually getting it right now were two very different things.

This is delayed gratification in its purest form. You developed the ability to hold tension between desire and reality. To be okay with the gap.

I still remember saving up for my first vinyl records in high school. Each one meant something because I'd waited for it. Worked for it. When everything's instant, nothing has weight.

5) You figured things out without Google

Bike chain broke? You either figured out how to fix it or walked home. Lost? You used a map or asked someone for directions.

There was no safety net of infinite information in your pocket. You had to troubleshoot, experiment, fail, try again.

My grandmother once drove six hours to bring me soup when I had the flu in college. Not because I couldn't handle it, but because that's what she did. She showed up. She figured things out. No GPS, no Yelp reviews of urgent care clinics. She just handled it.

That generation developed a confidence that comes from repeatedly solving problems without a tutorial. They trusted their ability to figure it out because they'd done it before.

6) You dealt with discomfort without medicating it immediately

I'm not talking about serious medical issues. I'm talking about the normal discomforts of life.

You were hot in summer, cold in winter. Car rides were long and boring. Waiting in line was just part of going to the store.

There wasn't an app to optimize every moment or a product to eliminate every inconvenience. You learned to tolerate discomfort because you had to.

This matters more than it sounds. In behavioral science, this is called distress tolerance, and it's one of the strongest predictors of mental health and resilience. The ability to sit with uncomfortable feelings without immediately trying to change them.

7) You had real, face-to-face conflict

You couldn't block someone or leave them on read. If you had a problem with your friend, you either talked about it face-to-face or it festered.

Most people chose to talk about it.

This forced you to develop conflict resolution skills. To read body language and tone. To apologize when you were wrong and stand your ground when you weren't.

These days, we can curate our social interactions to avoid anyone who challenges us. Back then, you dealt with the friend group you had. You learned to navigate disagreements and still show up to school the next day.

That's emotional resilience. The ability to have conflict and not have it destroy the relationship.

8) You watched adults struggle and recover

Life happened in full view. Dad lost his job, and the family had to adjust. Mom was stressed, and everyone knew it. Grandparents got sick.

Kids today are often shielded from adult problems until they're suddenly expected to handle their own. But if you grew up in the 60s or 70s, you saw resilience modeled. You watched adults face setbacks, feel the feelings, and keep going.

You learned that struggle isn't failure. It's just part of the deal.

My grandmother volunteers at a food bank every Saturday, has for twenty years. She's seen hard times herself, and instead of pretending life is always fine, she shows up for other people going through hard times. That's what resilience looks like in practice.

9) You had less, so you made do

There weren't seventeen options for everything. You wore hand-me-downs. You fixed things instead of replacing them. You made do with what you had.

This wasn't some romanticized simple living philosophy. It was just economics.

But here's what it taught: resourcefulness. Creativity. The ability to work within constraints instead of waiting for perfect conditions.

I see this in my own life now. Growing up middle-class in Sacramento, we didn't have everything we wanted, but we had what we needed. That distinction shaped how I approach problems. I don't need the perfect setup to start something. I just start with what I have.

10) You learned that feelings pass

Without constant validation from social media or texts, you experienced your feelings in their natural cycle. You were sad, and then you weren't. You were angry, and then you got over it.

You learned, through lived experience, that emotions are temporary. That you didn't need to do anything about them except feel them and wait.

This might be the most important one. So much of modern anxiety comes from the belief that uncomfortable feelings are emergencies that need immediate resolution. But feelings aren't emergencies. They're just information.

The 60s and 70s generation learned this by default. They felt their feelings and then went outside to play. They didn't have a thousand think pieces about emotional processing. They just processed.

Conclusion

None of this is about nostalgia or pretending the past was perfect. Those decades had serious problems, many of which we're still working to fix.

But somewhere in our rush to make life safer, easier, and more comfortable, we might have accidentally made it harder to develop resilience.

The good news? These habits aren't lost. You can choose to be bored sometimes. To let things take time. To sit with discomfort instead of scrolling past it.

You can learn what that generation learned, even if you have to do it consciously instead of by default.

Because resilience isn't something you're born with. It's something you build, one uncomfortable moment at a time.