I came of age in a world with three TV channels, phones that stayed tethered to walls, and neighbors who knew your middle name—and used it.

Nostalgia can be a liar, so I try not to polish the past.

But buried in the ordinary rhythms of the 1960s and 1970s are nine lessons that toughened people up in ways our current convenience-saturated lives don’t always replicate.

They’re not museum pieces. They’re practical, portable, and surprisingly modern if you let them be.

1) Unsupervised play builds real judgment

In my neighborhood, summer looked like this: a swarm of kids on bikes, a softball game stitched together with a tennis ball, and mothers calling from porches when the streetlights flicked on.

We negotiated rules, solved disputes, and bandaged knees with garden hoses and bravado. There were no orange slices on a schedule. The adults weren’t neglectful; they were busy and they trusted us to figure it out.

That freedom did two things. It taught risk calibration—how far to climb, how fast to ride, when to stop—and it made boredom our problem to solve. Stronger generations weren’t fearless; they were practiced.

When you’ve settled your own arguments and invented your own games, hard conversations later in life don’t feel like foreign travel. You’ve already stamped that passport.

Bring it forward: give kids (and yourself) “unsupervised hours” with clear boundaries. A park with a curfew. A backyard with tools and no script. Judgment grows in the spaces where no one is narrating your next move.

2) Make-do-and-mend beats “click to replace”

We fixed things back then—badly sometimes, but we tried. Saturday mornings smelled like WD-40 and coffee.

You knew which neighbor had a socket set and which one could tune a carburetor by ear. Replacing something was an admission that you’d lost an argument with your pride and your budget.

That habit did more than save money. It gave people a working relationship with reality. You learned materials have limits, screws strip if you rush, paint requires prep, and patience is a tool.

I still have a hammer with a duct-taped handle from 1978. It’s ugly and it works. That combination shaped how I treat people: not as disposable, not as perfect—sturdy with maintenance.

Bring it forward: before buying, attempt a fix. Watch the video, borrow the tool, call the neighbor. Even when you fail, you succeed at keeping your agency in the room.

3) Show up in person—little civic rituals matter

My parents’ generation did not outsource participation. You went to the school meeting even if you didn’t like crowds.

You voted on a Tuesday, rain or shine. You brought a casserole to the family you barely knew because their porch light had been off all week. None of it looked heroic. That was the point.

Strength is built in mundane commitments honored repeatedly. In the ’70s, I watched a town council meeting where two men who couldn’t stand each other still kept the same schedule: listen, speak, vote, shake hands. You learned that community is not chemistry; it’s choreography.

Bring it forward: pick a local ritual and make it rhythmic—library board, clean-up day, neighborhood watch that actually watches out. Screens can organize. Bodies still legitimize.

4) Wait your turn (and your photos)

Delayed gratification is a muscle we once trained without knowing it. You mailed bills.

You waited a week for your camera roll to come back, praying the birthday cake wasn’t a blur. You saved for a bicycle instead of financing one with a tap. We thought we were under-resourced. We were building endurance.

I saved for months to buy a vinyl record I wanted. When I finally brought it home, I listened all the way through, liner notes open like scripture.

That attention built patience—useful later, when careers and marriages asked for the same long listen.

Bring it forward: add friction on purpose. Let a desire simmer a week. Walk to the store instead of one-clicking. Listen to something start-to-finish without skipping. Patience isn’t quaint; it’s performance-enhancing.

5) Argue like family, not like enemies

Kitchen tables in the ’70s hosted debates that would set off fire alarms on social media today.

My father and uncle nearly came to blows over Watergate; then they split the last piece of pie. The lesson wasn’t that tempers never flared. It was that relationships outranked righteousness.

One night I remember clearly: the evening news showed a hearing; voices rose; my mother placed a hand on a shoulder and said, “Use inside words.” We laughed, then kept going.

By dessert, someone admitted a point; by dishes, we were on to baseball. That rhythm taught me to separate disagreement from disdain. Strong people don’t exile each other for thinking out loud.

Bring it forward: set rules of engagement at home. No eye-rolling. No diagnosing motives. Take turns. Then keep eating together. Argument, followed by shared cleanup, is a civilizing sequence.

6) Practical competence is dignity

Public schools taught shop class and home economics—and kids took both.

You learned to thread a machine, wire a lamp, plan a meal, balance a checkbook, patch a tire. We didn’t graduate as master carpenters or chefs. We graduated less scared of the world. Competence breeds calm; calm prevents overreaction.

In eleventh grade, I built a crooked bookcase that still stands. I see it and remember that I can start clumsy and end useful. Today, I watch younger folks fear basic repairs and older folks brag about not knowing how to cook. That’s not sophistication. It’s fragility with a nice watch.

Bring it forward: reclaim one skill. Sew on a button. Change a flat. Make soup from a chicken carcass. You’ll save money, sure. You’ll also remember you’re a person who can learn.

7) Know your neighbors—interdependence is insurance

In the ’60s and ’70s, we knew the names on both sides of our fence and the phone number of the lady across the street in case the dog got loose.

We borrowed sugar without a calendar invite. When a storm knocked out power, we dragged grills to the sidewalk and had an impromptu block party, thawing freezers together.

That web didn’t make us selfless. It made us smart. Interdependence is the oldest safety net. Strong generations were strong because they could pull on a dozen threads when one frayed.

Bring it forward: exchange numbers with the three closest doors. Share a spare key with one. Offer one specific favor you can provide—ladders, jump-starts, keeping an eye on a package. Community doesn’t require a grant; it requires hello.

8) Boredom is a teacher—let it work

We had boredom by the acre. No infinite feed, no autoplay. Saturday afternoons stretched.

You learned to tinker, read, nap, or stare at clouds until they confessed to being dragons. The gift of boredom wasn’t suffering. It was the discovery that your mind can make something out of nothing.

When everything’s filled for you, imagination atrophies. When you sit in a quiet room with yourself long enough, you meet ideas you didn’t know you’d been dodging. Some of my best decisions arrived after a long, uneventful hour in a chair that squeaked.

Bring it forward: schedule intentional nothing. Ten minutes without inputs before you reach for the shiny thing. Let your brain knock around in the empty. It will find a door.

9) Privacy and boundaries protect the soul

We didn’t publish every feeling in real time. Some thoughts lived in diaries with tiny locks; some griefs stayed in the family until they had edges that wouldn’t cut strangers.

Privacy wasn’t secrecy. It was incubation. Mystery wasn’t manipulation. It was mercy—for yourself and for others.

Today, we mistake radical transparency for authenticity. The older model respected cadence. Tell the truth, yes—but choose the room, choose the timing, and preserve parts of yourself that need a home, not a stage. The strongest people I know still carry that older rhythm. They’re not hiding. They’re gardening.

Bring it forward: create “offstage” spaces—conversations that don’t get posted, projects that are allowed to be bad in private, griefs that wait for trustworthy ears. Boundaries are how you keep your life from being strip-mined for content.

Two short scenes to anchor this in a human face

Scene one: the lawnmower rescue. In 1974, my mower died two passes into July grass. I was a new homeowner with exactly two tools and a budget that would barely buy a sandwich.

Mr. Alvarez next door heard the cursing and walked over with a socket set the size of a carry-on. He taught me to gap a spark plug with a nickel and to listen for the cough of a flooded carb. We drank warm lemonade and swatted flies and got the thing going.

He refused money. “You’ll help me with something I can’t lift,” he said. He was right. Interdependence disguised as neighborliness. I’ve been repaying that debt ever since.

Scene two: the long listen. In 1979, I saved for months to buy a record—an album I thought might teach me something about being a person. I took the bus, handed over crumpled bills, carried the square home like a relic, and put it on the turntable.

I listened end to end, twice, reading the lyrics like a map. It didn’t change my life. It altered my posture toward it. Waiting sharpened appreciation. Attention turned sound into instruction.

Decades later, when my marriage hit a snag, I recognized the same assignment: slow down, listen all the way through, resist the urge to skip to the chorus where you already know the words.

If you want to toughen your life the way the ’60s and ’70s quietly toughened ours, start small:

• Declare one evening a week screen-light, not screen-free—lamps on, music, a game you can play while ignoring the score.

• Repair or fail at repairing one object before you replace it. The attempt counts.

• Learn one neighbor’s name and one specific need you can meet.

• Ask for a clarifying fact before firing an opinion.

• Save for one thing you could technically afford now, as a reminder that desire can wait and get better at being desire.

• Protect a private project—a poem, a birdhouse, a quiet journal—no sharing until it’s ready to stand up straight.

Parting thoughts

Strength doesn’t arrive with a cape.

It accrues in the ordinary—kids inventing games; adults keeping promises to rooms that don’t clap; tired hands trying to fix what can still be fixed; people eating together after arguing; neighbors borrowing sugar and returning ladders; minds that can tolerate silence long enough to hear themselves.

The ’60s and ’70s didn’t make everyone strong, but they offered training most of us didn’t realize we were getting.

We can offer it to ourselves again—on purpose this time—without pretending rotary phones were magic.

Keep what worked: the patience, the repairs, the showing up, the quiet. The rest can stay in the attic with the avocado-green blender.