The hardest thing to explain to younger generations about growing up in the 1960s and 1970s isn’t the lack of technology — it’s the specific quality of unsupervised time, the slow afternoons, the boredom that produced things, the freedom that came with no adult tracking your location — and most of those conditions have been correctly retired, but the people they produced are unlikely to be replicated
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The Lost Art of Being Unwatched
People think the hardest part of explaining the 60s and 70s is the technology. The rotary phones. The three TV channels. The maps unfolded on the hood of the car.
It isn’t.
The hardest part is explaining that nobody knew where we were. Not in a scary way. Not in a neglectful way. Just: nobody knew. Nobody could have known. And we preferred it that way.
The summer I turned twelve, my mother would push me out the door after breakfast with nothing but a warning
People think the hardest part of explaining the 60s and 70s is the technology. The rotary phones. The three TV channels. The maps unfolded on the hood of the car.
It isn’t.
The hardest part is explaining that nobody knew where we were. Not in a scary way. Not in a neglectful way. Just: nobody knew. Nobody could have known. And we preferred it that way.
The summer I turned twelve, my mother would push me out the door after breakfast with nothing but a warning
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