Generation Wuss

Big Dave sent something interesting over; Scientists confirm adults raised in the 60s and 70s possess a resilience that is nearly extinct today. They grew up without safety nets or screens and emerged mentally tougher. Psychologists now warn this specific resilience is vanishing.

A specific tension has emerged in developmental psychology: children who grew up during the economic instability and social upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s appear to have cultivated a form of psychological endurance that is significantly less prevalent in younger generations today. According to a recent analysis of longitudinal life-course studies, the adaptive mechanisms forged by facing material scarcity and family disruption during those decades created a durable resilience that contemporary safety nets and digital comforts may have inadvertently eroded.

The foundational evidence for this claim resides in archival research from the Institute of Human Development at the University of California, Berkeley. Studies that began tracking individuals born in the 1920s through the Great Depression and World War II, and later their children navigating the 1960s and 1970s, reveal a counterintuitive pattern.

Men and women from families who experienced significant economic deprivation during the 1930s often fared better in midlife self-esteem and career stability compared to their more privileged counterparts. This trajectory established a baseline of adaptability that characterized the parenting and cultural values of the subsequent two decades.

The psychological resilience observed in those raised during the 1960s and 1970s is not a matter of nostalgia but a documented outcome of specific environmental pressures. Longitudinal data from the Oakland Growth Study and Berkeley Guidance Study demonstrate that families during hard times operated as fluid family economies. When household resources contracted, children and mothers entered the workforce, roles shifted, and adolescents gained early exposure to problem-solving and responsibility. This dynamic forced the development of executive function and emotional regulation in real-world settings rather than in structured extracurricular environments.

Well, I hate to say it but this rings true for me. I am amazed at the lack of psychological strength found among the post boomer alphabet generations. I know that economic conditions are different but the amount of thirty and forty year olds still living with their parents is astounding to me.

I was functionally independent at 13, hit the road hitchhiking around the country without a penny or care in the world at 16, came back and got an apartment in Encinitas at 17, worked good jobs and shitty jobs my whole life. Did what I had to do. Ditto my wife, Leslie had an apartment in Detroit at 15, her first job was at a roach clip factory.

We got beat up plenty. Got up, dusted ourself off and tried something else. Like our parents did. We believed in ourselves, knew that we could get through near anything.

Interesting that people who experienced economic deprivation earlier in life developed better self esteem and career stability later.

It rings with my theory that people that have truly never had the possibility of falling, crashing and failing never amount to shit. We have overprotected children and they have grown up spineless, overmedicated and without self worth.

Wonder how they will right their ship?