I grew up in the 60s and I’m done pretending everything is better now—some things we lost actually mattered

Now, don't get me wrong—I'm not nostalgic for everything. I know what we've gained—medical advances, civil rights progress, more options for women. Progress is real, and I'm grateful for it. When I hear someone my age say "things were just better back then," I know that's often shorthand for "things were better for people like me," and I'm not interested in that version of the argument.

But I grew up in the 1960s , and there are specific things I remember that I watch my children and grandchildren live without, and I don't think that loss is nothing. The way neighborhoods actually worked. The boredom I had as a child that nobody tried to fix, which forced me to be creative and ultimately fine. The feeling that time moved at a pace a person could actually inhabit.

I'm not arguing for going backward. I'm arguing for being honest about what we traded away, and whether the trade was entirely worth it. Some of it was. Some of it, I'm not sure. I've gotten tired of being made to feel that noticing the loss makes me a reactionary, as if we can't acknowledge both progress and loss at once. We can. Here's what I think we actually lost.

I miss when neighbors were friends

In the neighborhood I grew up in, you didn't have to cultivate a relationship with your neighbors. It happened in the gaps—over the fence, on the sidewalk, at each other's back doors. Community wasn't something anyone organized; it was the byproduct of living near people you actually saw every day. My grandchildren live in neighborhoods where they know almost nobody on their street. Not because they're unfriendly, but because the structure that used to produce that knowing has disappeared. People drive into their garages, the door closes, and that's it. You have to go out of your way to build something that used to just happen, and most people don't have the time.

I miss when boredom wasn't a problem to fix

My children had summer stretches of nothing. Not scheduled nothing—actual nothing. Weeks where they had to figure out what to do with themselves, where they had to be uncomfortable and creative and sometimes miserable in a way that produced something. I was bored as a child more than I can count, and that boredom was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

My grandchildren are never bored in that way. I watch it sometimes and feel something I can only describe as grief. The moment boredom appears, there's something to fill it—a device, a streaming service, a scheduled activity. I understand why. Boredom is uncomfortable, and parents don't want their children to be uncomfortable. But the discomfort was doing something. It was building tolerance, generating creativity, teaching a child that not every moment needs to be filled. That capacity seems harder to come by now, and I think we'll be feeling the consequences for a long time.

I miss when friendship happened without effort

Marisa Franco, Ph.D., writes that friendship has become harder to sustain in modern life—that adults lose roughly half their friends every seven years, and that our culture has systematically undervalued platonic connections in favor of productivity and romantic relationships, leaving people with fewer and shallower bonds than previous generations had.

I remember friendship being a side effect of life rather than a separate project.

You were friends with people because you lived near them, worked alongside them, and showed up in the same places repeatedly. The proximity created the friendship. Now people have to schedule the proximity, which means they have to decide the friendship is worth the effort before it has a chance to form. That's a hard way to build anything.

I miss when time moved differently

There was a particular quality to time when I was young that I don't experience the same way anymore. Time moved at a pace that allowed you to actually be somewhere. You weren't simultaneously somewhere else. You weren't holding something in your pocket that could pull your attention in twelve directions.

A Sunday afternoon was a Sunday afternoon. You were in it. That quality of presence—not mindfulness, just ordinary presence, being where you were because there was nowhere else to be—I think that's genuinely gone. And I'm not sure we've fully reckoned with what we gave up when it left.

I miss when rest was built into the week

Kirsten Noack, RCC, writes that the nervous system is shaped by its environment—that chronic low-grade stress becomes the baseline when the body never gets sustained periods of genuine rest and unstructured time, and that this is increasingly the experience of children growing up in a world that has removed the natural rhythms of rest and play that human beings are wired to need.

Sundays were different when I was growing up. Not only in a religious sense, but in a cultural one. There was a shared agreement that one day a week, things would be slower. Stores were closed. People were home. There was a particular quiet that came with it, a particular permission to stop.

That pause is gone. Everything is available all the time, which means nothing ever really closes, which means the permission to stop has to come entirely from yourself. Most people can't sustain it. I know people who haven't had a genuine day off in years—not because they're workaholics, but because the structure that used to enforce rest no longer exists.

I miss when things were made to last

The furniture in the house I grew up in was still there when my parents died. Appliances lasted decades. Things were repaired rather than replaced. There was a whole economy of maintenance—cobblers, tailors, radio repair shops—that has mostly disappeared because it's cheaper to buy new than fix old.

Something was lost in that shift. My mother had a sewing machine she used for forty years. I think about that machine sometimes. The throwaway economy has made some things more accessible and made everything feel more disposable. I think the effect on how we relate to everything—not just objects—is worth thinking about.

I miss when being unreachable was normal

When I left the house, I was gone. Nobody could reach me. If something came up, they'd deal with it, or they'd wait. There was a kind of dignity in that—in the assumption that your time was your own, that you weren't on call for everyone who might want you. I still feel something like relief when my phone dies, and I have no choice but to be exactly where I am. Now I watch people apologize for not responding to a text within an hour. That's a new way to be human. I'm not convinced it's better.

I miss when ordinary life didn't need curating

Meals were whatever they were. Parties were whatever they were. We hosted people in homes where the clutter was visible and nobody minded. The ordinary was just the ordinary—it didn't need to be curated before it could be shared.

I watch younger women in my life spend enormous time making ordinary life presentable for the internet, not for the people actually in the room. The quiet permission to just live without documenting it is something worth mourning. The table didn't need to be decorated. The cake didn't need a theme. We were just there, and that was enough.

I miss when you could be just one place at a time

This is what it all comes down to, I think.

When I was young, you were somewhere. You were at dinner, at a party, or at work, and those were the only places you were. The conversation in front of you was the only conversation. The people in the room were the only people.

Now everyone is always also somewhere else. Partially. The full presence that used to be the ordinary condition of being with another person has become something you have to work to create—has become, in fact, a kind of gift. And the things that used to happen in that full presence—the quiet conversations, the comfortable silences, the moments that didn't have to be anything—those are harder to find. I think we're all a little worse off for their absence, even those who never knew they were there.

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of our "As Told to Bolde” series where we share personal stories from individuals we have interviewed or surveyed. For more information on how we create content, please review our Editorial Policy .