There's a kind of resilience that now feels almost alien in the modern West. People born in the 1960s and 1970s often grew up in conditions that today would be described as "hardship," yet at the time were simply regarded as ordinary life. The recent reflections circulating online about this "old school resilience" strike a nerve because many younger people intuitively sense that something important has been lost.
This resilience was not the Hollywood fantasy of hyper-masculine toughness, nor the modern corporate slogan of "grit." It was something quieter and more practical. It meant carrying on despite discomfort because there was no expectation that life would arrange itself around personal feelings. Children walked to school alone, solved disputes without adult mediation, entertained themselves without constant stimulation, and learned early that boredom, frustration, embarrassment, and occasional failure were survivable.
The post-war generations inherited societies that, while materially poorer than today, often imposed greater real-world responsibility. A teenager might have a part-time job, help support family finances, repair broken equipment rather than replace it, or simply accept inconvenience as part of life. Homes were smaller, luxuries fewer, and social status less dependent upon performative identity. Much of daily existence required adaptation rather than complaint.
One reason this produced resilience was that adversity was normalised rather than medicalised. Today, many ordinary stresses are rapidly reframed as trauma, pathology, or grounds for institutional intervention. But earlier generations often lacked the luxury of interpreting every difficulty psychologically. If the car broke down, you fixed it. If the weather ruined plans, you adapted. If someone insulted you, you got over it. This did not eliminate suffering, but it prevented the cultivation of fragility as a social identity.
Technology also transformed expectations. The pre-digital world contained natural friction. You waited for letters. You got lost driving. You endured boredom in queues. You could not instantly summon entertainment, food delivery, or emotional validation. Ironically, these inconveniences trained patience and self-regulation. A society without constant dopamine stimulation produced people more capable of tolerating delayed gratification.
There is also the uncomfortable fact that older generations often grew up closer to genuine scarcity and danger. The long shadow of World War II still hung over families in the 1960s and 1970s. Many parents and grandparents had lived through depression, war, rationing, migration, or industrial hardship. Their children absorbed, indirectly, the understanding that civilisation itself was not guaranteed. Modern affluent societies, by contrast, often raised generations within systems so stable that inconvenience began to feel like oppression.
None of this means the past was utopian. Older societies could be harsher, less emotionally expressive, and sometimes indifferent to real suffering. Some people endured genuine abuse under the banner of "toughening up." Nostalgia can romanticise hardship just as modern culture can overprotect against it. But there remains a kernel of truth in the old-school resilience argument: human beings develop strength partly through exposure to manageable adversity.
The deeper issue may be civilisational. Complex technological societies increasingly attempt to remove all friction from life. Yet friction is precisely what builds competence, patience, and emotional endurance. A culture obsessed with safety, optimisation, and emotional cushioning may inadvertently produce citizens unable to cope when reality refuses to cooperate.
The irony is that many older people who grew up with less abundance often report feeling more psychologically grounded than generations raised amidst unprecedented comfort. That does not prove the old ways were superior in every respect. But it suggests that resilience is not manufactured through slogans, therapy apps, or motivational seminars. It emerges from lived experience, responsibility, and repeated encounters with a world that does not instantly bend to individual desire.
Civilisations may eventually rediscover this lesson the hard way. History has a habit of reintroducing hardship regardless of whether societies believe in resilience or not:
"Hard times create strong men.
Strong men create good times.
Good times create weak men.
Weak men create hard times."