I grew up in the 1960s, and I’m tired of pretending that everything about today’s world is better — some things we lost along the way actually mattered.
I know how this sounds. Trust me.
Every generation thinks the one that follows has ruined everything. I’m aware of the cliché. I have no interest in being the guy who shakes his fist at the clouds and tells you things were perfect back in his day.
They weren’t. The 1960s had serious problems. Inequality was worse. Opportunity was narrower. Whole groups of people were excluded from basic dignity. I’m not here to romanticize any of that.
But I am here to say something that I think a lot of people my age feel but have stopped saying out loud: we lost some things along the way that actually mattered. And pretending we didn’t isn’t helping anyone.
We lost the neighborhood
When I was a kid, I knew every person on my street. Not their social media profiles. Their actual faces. Their voices. The sound of their screen doors.
My mother borrowed sugar from the woman next door and returned it with a plate of biscuits. That wasn’t a transaction. That was a relationship maintained through small, repeated gestures of trust.
Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam documented exactly this kind of loss in his landmark work “Bowling Alone”, published in the Journal of Democracy. Drawing on nearly 500,000 interviews, Putnam showed that Americans were signing fewer petitions, belonging to fewer organizations, knowing their neighbors less, meeting with friends less frequently, and even socializing with their own families less often.
The decline wasn’t subtle. PTA membership dropped from over 12 million in 1964 to barely 5 million by the early 1980s. Volunteering for organizations like the Red Cross fell by 61 percent from 1970 onward. Participation in clubs, churches, unions, and civic groups all followed the same downward curve.
Something shifted. And it wasn’t that people became worse. It was that the structures that used to bring us together — physically, regularly, without agenda — quietly disappeared.
We lost boredom (and what it gave us)
This is the one people roll their eyes at. But hear me out.
When I was young, boredom was a regular part of life. There was nothing to do on a Sunday afternoon except sit on the porch, kick a ball against a wall, or wander down to the creek.
And out of that boredom came things that mattered. Conversations with neighbors that went on for hours because nobody had anywhere to be. Games we invented because nobody had invented them for us. A capacity for stillness that I watch my grandchildren struggle with now.
Today, every moment of potential boredom is filled with a screen. And I’m not saying screens are evil. But I am saying that when you eliminate all the empty spaces in a day, you eliminate the moments where connection used to happen by accident.
The World Health Organization now recognizes social isolation and loneliness as a priority public health concern, with around one in six people worldwide experiencing loneliness. That’s not a personal failing. That’s a structural one.
We lost trust
In the 1960s, most people trusted their neighbors, their institutions, and the basic good faith of strangers.
I’m not naive about this. That trust was partly maintained by homogeneity, and the exclusion of people who didn’t fit the dominant mold. I understand the critique.
But the trust itself — the baseline assumption that the person next to you at the bus stop or the shop counter was probably a decent human being — that had value. And we’ve lost it.
Putnam’s research showed that this decline in social trust tracked almost perfectly alongside the decline in civic participation. As people spent less time together in shared spaces, they trusted each other less. The connection between social capital and trust wasn’t incidental. It was causal.
And you can feel the absence of that trust everywhere now. In the way people interact online. In the way we approach strangers. In the low-grade suspicion that colors so many public interactions.
We lost unstructured childhood
My childhood was largely unsupervised. I left the house after breakfast, roamed the neighborhood with other kids, and came home when the streetlights came on.
Nobody scheduled our play. Nobody monitored it. We negotiated conflicts ourselves, invented rules for games nobody had ever played before, and learned — through direct experience — what it felt like to be bored, scared, brave, and free.
I watch children today and their days are filled from morning to night with structured activities, supervised play, and screen time. I’m not blaming parents. The world feels less safe, even if statistically it may not be. The pressure to optimize every moment of a child’s development is relentless.
But something is lost when children never experience the freedom to be unsupervised. The confidence that comes from figuring things out on your own. The social skills that develop when adults aren’t there to mediate every disagreement.
We lost slowness
My father came home from work at 5:30 and that was it. Work was over. There was no email to check, no Slack messages, no laptop open on the kitchen table.
Dinner was slow. Evenings were long. Weekends felt like actual weekends, not extensions of the working week with slightly different furniture.
A 2024 review published in World Psychiatry examined the evidence on declining social connection globally and identified several contributing factors: modernization, economic disparities, digital technologies, and shifts in civic engagement. The researchers concluded that this decline represents a pressing public health issue requiring urgent action.
We didn’t need a peer-reviewed journal to tell us that. We could feel it. The frantic pace. The inability to sit still. The guilt that comes with doing nothing when there’s always something that could be done.
What I’m not saying
I’m not saying the 1960s were better overall. Medical care is better now. Civil rights protections are stronger. Women have more opportunity. Technology has solved problems that used to kill people.
I’m not asking anyone to go backwards.
I’m asking us to be honest about what we traded away. Because the narrative that everything is always getting better, that progress is a straight line, that anyone who questions modern life is just nostalgic — that narrative is stopping us from having a conversation we need to have.
We are more connected than any generation in human history and simultaneously lonelier. The US Surgeon General declared loneliness and isolation a public health epidemic in 2023, comparing the health impact to smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
That’s not progress. That’s a warning sign.
What I think we need to remember
The things that made life good in the 1960s weren’t expensive. They weren’t complicated. They didn’t require an app or a subscription.
They were things like: knowing your neighbors. Eating dinner at the same table every night. Letting kids play without a schedule. Having conversations that lasted longer than a text message. Trusting that the person next to you was probably alright.
We can have all of that again. None of it requires going back in time.
But it does require admitting that we lost something. And that the loss wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice — made gradually, collectively, often without realizing what was being given up.
I grew up in the 1960s. Not everything about that era was better. But some things were. And I’m tired of pretending otherwise.
