While millennials frantically refresh their phones and Gen Z abandons tasks at the first glitch, there's a generation that stands calmly in the chaos, armed with a superpower they never asked for but can't help having mastered.
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Last week, I watched a twenty-something abandon their grocery cart in frustration when the self-checkout machine froze for the third time. Meanwhile, at the regular checkout, a woman my age stood calmly as the cashier called for a price check, then discovered the register tape needed changing, then waited as a new cashier took over mid-transaction. She simply smiled and said, "No rush, dear."
This small moment captures something I've been thinking about lately. My generation learned patience not as a virtue but as a survival skill. We didn't have the luxury of instant everything, and surprisingly, that limitation shaped us in ways that still serve us well today.
We know how to wait in line without losing our minds
Remember when banking meant standing in an actual line? Or when paying bills required writing checks, finding stamps, and walking to a mailbox? We spent cumulative years of our lives waiting, and we learned to make peace with it.
Just yesterday at the DMV, I brought a book and settled in for what I knew would be at least an hour. The young man next to me was practically vibrating with frustration after fifteen minutes, refreshing his phone constantly as if that would make time move faster. When you've waited in lines before smartphones existed, you develop an almost zen-like ability to just be present with the waiting.
Phone calls with actual humans don't faze us
Have you ever watched someone under thirty try to dispute a billing error? They'll spend hours searching for an email address or chat function rather than pick up the phone. But those of us who remember when calling was the only option? We dial without hesitation.
During my teaching years, I must have made thousands of calls to parents, administrators, and various bureaucratic offices. You learn that the person on the other end is usually trying to help, that staying calm gets you further than frustration, and that sometimes you need to be transferred four times before reaching the right department. It's not efficient, but it's human, and we're comfortable with that inefficiency.
We can follow recipes without watching someone else do it first
The other day, a neighbor asked if I had a good recipe for pot roast. I handed her my recipe card, handwritten and splattered with decades of gravy stains. She looked at it like it was written in hieroglyphics. "Don't you have a video I could watch?"
My generation learned to cook from written recipes, often passed down on index cards or torn from magazines. We learned to visualize what "cream butter and sugar until fluffy" meant without seeing someone demonstrate it. We developed intuition through trial and error, burning plenty of dishes along the way. That process of figuring things out ourselves, making mistakes, and trying again built a confidence that no YouTube tutorial can replicate.
Waiting for medical results is just part of life
When I had my first knee replacement at 65, the surgeon told me test results would take a week. A week! The younger patients in my physical therapy group were constantly calling the office, checking patient portals, driving themselves crazy with anxiety.
But here's what thirty-two years of annual mammograms and various health scares teach you: the results come when they come. Calling doesn't make the lab work faster. Worrying doesn't change what the tests show. You learn to compartmentalize that anxiety and continue living your life in the meantime.
We understand that relationships take years to build
I recently wrote about the slow art of friendship after sixty, and this connects directly to that theme. We didn't have apps to instantly connect us with like-minded people. Friendships developed over years of showing up to the same places, having repeated interactions, slowly revealing ourselves.
When I was raising my two children alone, I became close with another single mother in our neighborhood. It took probably two years before we progressed from polite waves to actual conversations, another year before we started having coffee together. Today's young people often expect instant connection or they move on. We understood that the best relationships often start with years of simple proximity and patience.
Learning something new means accepting you'll be terrible at first
A few months ago, I decided to learn how to use some new computer software for organizing photos. The young woman teaching the class at our library kept saying, "This is really intuitive once you get it." But nothing about technology is intuitive when you didn't grow up with it.
What my generation understands, though, is the long arc of learning. When I went back to school as a single mother, taking on debt that would follow me for years, I knew the education wouldn't be instant. Each semester built on the last. Each assignment taught me something I'd need later. We're comfortable being beginners because we've been beginners many times before, in an era when you couldn't just Google your way to competence.
We can handle financial setbacks without complete panic
Living on a teacher's salary while raising two kids alone taught me that financial stability is often an illusion anyway. You budget fiercely, something breaks, you figure it out, you rebuild. There was no app to instantly transfer money from savings, no same-day loans from online lenders.
When unexpected expenses hit, we had to wait for banks to open, for checks to clear, for payday to come. We learned that most financial crises, while stressful, weren't actually emergencies. The electricity company would give you an extension. The landlord would accept partial payment. These things took phone calls and patience and sometimes swallowing your pride, but they were survivable.
Reading long books doesn't feel like a commitment
Every semester, I'd assign novels to my high school students, and every semester, they'd groan about the length. "Can't we just watch the movie?" But those of us who grew up when entertainment meant books, and when finishing a book might take weeks? We understand that some stories need time to unfold.
There's a patience required in reading that my generation developed naturally. We can sit with ambiguity for three hundred pages, trusting the author to bring things together. We don't need immediate resolution or constant action. We understand that sometimes the journey through those pages is more important than reaching the end.
Final thoughts
This isn't about romanticizing inconvenience or pretending the old ways were better. I love that I can video chat with my grandchildren, that I can deposit checks with my phone, that information is instantly accessible.
But there's something to be said for a generation that learned patience through necessity. We developed a tolerance for discomfort, an acceptance of delay, and a recognition that most things worth having require time. These aren't skills we chose to develop; they were forced upon us by circumstance. And perhaps that's exactly why they stuck.
