9 old-school habits people in their 60s and 70s refuse to drop and why they’re happier than tech?obsessed youngsters

The old woman on the park bench flips open a paperback whose spine has gone soft with years of rereading. Around her, a loose confetti of autumn leaves tumbles across the path. A teenage boy cruises by on an electric scooter, phone in hand, thumbs flying, wireless earbuds glowing like tiny blue insects in his ears. He doesn’t see the leaves. He doesn’t see the bench. He doesn’t see much of anything beyond the bright square of his screen.

The woman turns a page. She looks up, watches a crow arguing with a squirrel over some invisible treasure, smiles to no one in particular, and returns to her story. Her phone, if she has one, is buried deep in her bag, muted, forgotten.

Spend enough time around people in their 60s and 70s, and you start to notice a kind of quiet rebellion in the way they move through the world. It shows up in the objects they still use, the routines they refuse to abandon, the calm in their faces when a router fails or a battery dies or the world goes suddenly, nervously offline.

Call them old-school habits, call them wisdom, call them stubbornness—it doesn’t really matter. What matters is this: many of these elders are, in a subtle but measurable way, happier and more grounded than the tech-obsessed generations rushing past them. And it has everything to do with the things they simply never stopped doing.

The Ritual of Slowness: Real Mornings, Not Screen Mornings

Ask someone in their seventies about their morning routine and you’re likely to get a list that sounds almost ceremonial: put on the kettle, open the curtains, feed the cat, read the paper, step outside “to see what the day feels like.”

There’s an almost tactile quality to these mornings. The hiss of the kettle. The weight of a ceramic mug. The faint creak of the front door. The air—whether it’s cool and damp or already buzzing with heat—on bare skin. The crinkle of newspaper pages, or the smooth slide of a library book’s cover.

Compare that to the average young adult’s experience: the day starts with light, yes—but the LED kind. Before the feet hit the floor, there’s already a scroll of headlines, notifications, overnight emails, algorithm-chosen videos, group chats. The nervous system, still half asleep, is flung into a digital crowd.

Older adults aren’t saints; many have smartphones and social media and even streaming habits that would make a teenager proud. But a lot of them still protect a kind of analog margin around the edges of the day. They drink their coffee and just…drink their coffee. They look out a window without needing to take a picture of the view. They let their brains wake up at the speed of boiling water, not buffered animations.

Inside that slow beginning is something deceptively powerful: a sense of control. When your first encounter of the day is with the sun on your kitchen floor, not with the crisis feed in your pocket, your nervous system gets the message that the world might be tough and complicated, but right now, in this rectangle of morning light, things are okay. That small pocket of okayness turns out to be one of the best inoculations against the drip-drip of digital stress.

The Handwritten Life: Notes, Lists, and Letters That Don’t Ping

You can tell a lot about a person by the way they keep track of their days. Somewhere in the home of a 60- or 70-something, you’re likely to find a paper calendar on the wall, a notebook by the phone, a stack of envelopes with real stamps in a kitchen drawer. Maybe a shoebox of letters, rubber-banded into bundles, saved “just because.”

These aren’t just relics; they’re ongoing practices. A grocery list written with a dull pencil on the back of a piece of junk mail. The date circled on a calendar for a friend’s birthday. A postcard from a trip, chosen for its strange picture and mailed with a scribbled line: “Thought of you when I saw this.”

There is science, of course, behind the magic of pen on paper—better memory consolidation, slower and deeper thinking, the physicality of handwriting anchoring abstract thoughts into the real world. But the emotional science is just as important. The old-school habit of writing by hand forces a pause. You can’t jolt from task to task with the same speed as you can on a phone. The body has to join the mind in the act.

And letters, especially, carry something digital messages rarely manage: weight. You feel a letter arrive. You see the familiar handwriting on the envelope. The paper has a smell—dust, maybe, or the faint sweetness of a home that uses scented drawer liners, or the dry air of a long flight. You hold it with both hands to read.

You can’t swipe away from a letter. You can’t get a pop-up while unfolding the page. For the few minutes that you’re reading, it’s the only thing happening. In a life that’s become a constant buffet of fragmented attention, many older adults are sitting down to actual, nourishing meals of focus, served the old-fashioned way.

Old-School Habit	Typical Tech Alternative	Emotional Difference
Handwritten letters	Text messages / DMs	Slower, more thoughtful; creates lasting keepsakes
Paper calendars and lists	Calendar apps, reminders	Less interruption; more conscious planning
Face-to-face chats	Social media threads	Deeper connection; body language and tone preserved
Walking for errands	Delivery apps	Movement, chance encounters, sense of place

The Art of Showing Up: Conversations That Don’t Need Wi‑Fi

In a small-town café, two men in their late sixties lean over chipped mugs, talking in that low, companionable murmur of people who have known each other for decades. Their phones are nowhere in sight. They’re not taking photos of their food. They’re not checking in, posting, or livestreaming the moment. They’re simply in it.

This is another old-school habit many people in their 60s and 70s refuse to drop: the practice of actually turning up, in person, for the small rituals of community life. Coffee with a friend. Weekly choir practice. A bridge game. Volunteering at the local library. Sunday dinners that require real chairs, not just a group chat.

Our culture tends to treat social media like a magic substitute for actual social life, but we’re learning that it’s more like a snack than a meal. Quick, frequent, oddly unsatisfying. Older adults, who built their worlds long before “likes” existed, still reach instinctively for something more filling: body language, eye contact, the rhythm of shared silence. They tell stories that stretch on for minutes, not seconds, without worrying about losing the algorithm’s attention.

They also know, through hard life experience, that when things go wrong—the diagnosis, the funeral, the broken marriage—it’s the people who physically come to your door, or sit beside you in a waiting room, who carry you. So they practice showing up even when nothing dramatic is happening. The bridge games and choir rehearsals and coffee dates are not just entertainment; they’re rehearsals for the kind of solidarity that keeps a life from fracturing under pressure.

Meanwhile, the tech-obsessed often feel surrounded and yet lonely, plugged in but not held. Thousands of online connections, but few people who know the exact way your shoulders slump when you’re truly tired. The older generation’s stubborn insistence on real-world socializing isn’t nostalgia. It’s survival.

The Beauty of Making Do: Repair, Reuse, and the Quiet Pride of Enough

In a suburban garage, a 72-year-old man stands over a workbench lit by a single dusty bulb. There’s a toaster disassembled in front of him, metal guts exposed, the smell of heated dust hanging in the air. He’s not here to save seven dollars on a replacement. He’s here because fixing things is part of who he is.

Old-school habits around money and possessions are woven deeply into the lives of many elders. They keep glass jars “just in case.” They mend socks and sew on buttons. They have a drawer full of tools inherited from someone who knew how to use them. They know what it means to make do, to live within constraints, to extract every last bit of usefulness from objects before letting them go.

In a culture that rewards constant upgrading, this mindset can look quaint or even stingy. But buried inside it is a powerful antidote to the anxiety-soaked consumerism that saturates younger generations. When you’ve lived a lifetime learning that “good enough” really is good enough, the pressure to own the newest, fastest, shiniest thing loosens its grip.

There’s also a kind of earned confidence that comes with knowing how to repair the physical world. Tech-obsessed youngsters live at the mercy of opaque systems—sealed batteries, warranty void if opened, everything run by distant servers. If something breaks, they’re often helpless. Many older adults, by contrast, carry the memory of fixing their own bikes, cars, radios, clothing. They’ve patched roofs, unstuck windows, unjammed washing machines. Even when they can’t fix it themselves anymore, that history leaves a residue of calm: things break, and then we deal with it.

The result? Less panic when the fridge makes a weird noise or when the economy goes sideways. A grounded belief that humans have gotten through worse, with less, and so will again. Not exactly the story you hear in a world where every minor inconvenience is served up as a catastrophe in your news feed.

The Slow Joy of Simple Pleasures: Walks, Gardens, and Unphotographed Moments

Late afternoon, and the light is turning that particular shade of honeyed gold that makes everything softer. A woman in her late sixties stands in her garden, fingers sunk into the soil, coaxing stubborn weeds away from tomato plants. Her knees hurt. There’s dirt under her fingernails. She is, by every modern metric, offline. And she is glowing with a quiet kind of joy.

Walk around any neighborhood long enough and you’ll see them: retirees tending rosebushes, strolling the same route every day, sitting on front steps watching the world go by. These are old-school habits that value being over broadcasting. The moment doesn’t become more real when it’s shared online; it’s real because they’re in it, fully.

Walking, especially, is one of their secret happiness engines. Not the measured, tracked, shared-for-accountability kind of walking, necessarily, but the “I’m going out to stretch my legs and see what’s happening” kind. The rewards are small but cumulative: the changing angle of the sun across seasons, the neighbor’s new puppy, the smell of rain on hot pavement, the satisfaction of nodding hello to the same stranger until, one day, they’re not a stranger anymore.

These simple, sensory experiences act as a counterweight to the hyper-stimulation of digital life. While younger people chase bursts of dopamine from notifications and viral videos, elders are gathering slower, steadier forms of pleasure from birdsong, from kneaded dough, from folded laundry, from a good chair and a patch of sun. It’s not that they’re incapable of enjoying technology; many do, and quite a lot. But they don’t ask tech to be their primary source of joy.

Instead, they lean on something quieter: an intimacy with the physical world, built over decades of paying attention to it.

Choosing Presence in a World That Profits from Distraction

If you listen closely, you’ll notice that the old-school habits people in their 60s and 70s cling to share a common thread: presence. Handwritten letters demand the full presence of the writer. Morning rituals of tea and sunlight invite the presence of the senses. Repairing things requires the presence of patience and attention. Face-to-face conversations, simple walks, unphotographed sunsets—these are all ways of saying: I’m here. Not elsewhere. Not scattered into a million digital fragments. Here.

Tech-obsessed youngsters, on the other hand, live in an economy that profits directly from their distraction. Their attention has become a commodity, bought and sold by companies whose entire business model depends on interrupting, hijacking, and fragmenting that attention as much as possible. It’s not that younger people are weaker or more frivolous; they’re simply swimming against a much stronger current.

People in their 60s and 70s grew up in a different river. They learned early that if you wanted to hear from someone, you wrote a letter or you visited. If you wanted entertainment, you picked up a book or tuned in at a specific time for a show. If you were bored, you stared out a window, doodled, whittled, daydreamed.

That muscle for sustained attention has not entirely atrophied. Many of them still carry it with them, a quiet superpower that makes them less vulnerable to the anxiety storm whipping through younger generations. They see technology as a useful tool, not an ambient atmosphere. They can put it down without feeling like their entire identity is at risk.

Maybe that’s the real secret behind their stubborn habits: not a sentimental love of the past, but a clear-eyed sense that certain ways of being human are worth preserving. Slowness. Tangibility. Sufficiency. Community. Presence.

In the end, the question isn’t whether we should all give up our smartphones and move into a cabin lined with encyclopedias. The question is whether we’re willing to learn from those who remember what it felt like when life wasn’t always buzzing in their pockets. To ask the woman on the park bench what she likes about starting her day without a phone. To ask the man in the garage why he bothers fixing a toaster instead of clicking “Buy Now.” To ask the gardeners and walkers and letter-writers what, exactly, they’re getting from these habits—because whatever it is, it looks a lot like a gentler, steadier, more grounded kind of happiness.

We might not trade our apps for address books or our cloud storage for shoeboxes of photos, but we can borrow the spirit behind those old-school habits. We can declare a small section of the day screen-free. We can walk to the store when we could have ordered delivery. We can write something by hand, just because it feels good to feel the ink sink into the paper. We can call, or better yet, visit.

Somewhere, an elder is turning a page, stirring a pot, watering a plant, humming an old song while a notification light blinks silently in the other room. They are not out of touch. They are in touch—with their lives, with their bodies, with their moments. And that, more than any new update or feature, might be the upgrade the rest of us are truly craving.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are people in their 60s and 70s really happier than younger generations?

Surveys in many countries suggest that happiness tends to dip in midlife and often rises again in later years. While not every older adult is happier, many report greater contentment, less social comparison, and more acceptance than younger, highly connected generations.

Do older adults completely reject technology?

Most don’t. Many use smartphones, video calls, and social media. The difference is often in how they use them: as tools, not as a constant background presence. They tend to keep certain analog habits alongside digital ones, which helps protect their attention and emotional balance.

What old-school habit is easiest for younger people to adopt?

Starting the day without a screen is one of the most accessible. Simply delaying phone use for the first 20–30 minutes and replacing it with a small ritual—making coffee, stretching, stepping outside—can noticeably change the tone of the day.

How can I build stronger face-to-face connections if everyone is busy?

Begin small and consistent. Schedule a weekly coffee with one friend, join a local group or class, or host a simple dinner where phones stay off the table. Regular, modest in-person interactions add up over time into real community.

Is it too late to change my relationship with technology?

No. Attention is a habit, and habits can be reshaped at any age. You don’t need to abandon technology; you only need to set clearer boundaries around it—screen-free times, screen-free spaces, and a handful of analog rituals that anchor your day in the physical world.