Before the World Lost Its Balance

I listened to a podcast this morning called “Psychology of People who Grew up in the 1960’s.”

Here’s my takeaway:

Of course after listening to it, I started going down memory lane looking for the correlation between the podcast’s references and my own life growing up  — not with nostalgia, and certainly not with the idea that one generation is better than another, but with curiosity.

It was a different world.

Not perfect.
Not idealized.
But quieter. Slower. Less mediated.

As children, we learned things without realizing we were learning them.

We learned how to be alone without being lonely.
How to manage ourselves without constant oversight.
How to feel our way through uncertainty without having language for it.
How to entertain ourselves, solve problems, and adapt — not because we were taught to, but because life required it.

And most importantly (I can’t speak for everyone) I learned how to think on my feet, analyze a situation to determine how much trouble I’d be in if my mom found out. If trouble was the outcome then how could I talk myself out of it no less for the wear. Sometimes it worked and…sometimes it didn’t. I always tried. A for effort and self preservation!

There was freedom, but also responsibility.
There was resilience, but it wasn’t named or praised.
It was simply woven into daily life.

I don’t believe children of the 60s were stronger or wiser than those who came after, quite the contrary. I do believe we were shaped by a world that still had balance — before speed, saturation, and constant stimulation became the norm.

Children of the late 70s and early 80’s experienced echoes of this too, though already diluted.
As time moved forward, the world grew louder, faster, more managed, more watched — and less spacious.

With that shift came many gains.
But something quiet was lost.

The tools we absorbed back then — self-regulation, internal orientation, comfort with simplicity — weren’t taught intentionally. They were a byproduct of the environment. And those tools now live deeply in my nervous system, my way of being, my instincts.

For a long time, I thought my groundedness came solely from growing up in a blue-collar environment. And that’s certainly part of it. But I’m realizing now it’s larger than that.

It’s generational. It’s environmental. It’s embodied.

That early world taught many of us how to be in the world without being consumed by it. How to stand steady without hardening. How to be self-reliant — sometimes too much so — and later learn the equally important lesson of receiving, connecting, and softening.

This isn’t a call to go backward.
It’s an invitation to remember.

To bring forward what worked — simplicity, presence, internal steadiness — and integrate it consciously into a world that desperately needs grounding.