People who grew up in the 1960s and 70s were handed a model of adulthood that had almost no room for joy as a daily practice – only as a reward – and many of them are still operating on that original instruction

My father-in-law is Vietnamese, and he works seven days a week. Not because he has to. Because stopping feels wrong. When I asked him once what he does for fun, he looked at me like I’d asked him what colour gravity is.

He’s not unusual. He’s a product of his generation and his context. But the pattern isn’t limited to Vietnam. I see the same thing in Australians his age, in Americans, in Europeans. People who came of age in the 1960s and 70s were handed a model of adulthood that went something like this: you work, you endure, you provide, and if you’re lucky, you get to enjoy yourself when it’s done.

Joy wasn’t a daily practice. It was a reward. A holiday. A retirement. A weekend, if you’d earned it. And many of the people who absorbed that instruction are now in their sixties and seventies, still waiting for permission to enjoy a Tuesday.

The operating system they were given

The generation that came of age in the postwar decades inherited a particular definition of a good life. It was shaped by the values of the era: hard work, deferred gratification, stability, and a belief that happiness was the natural consequence of doing your duty. You didn’t pursue happiness. You earned it. Through decades of sacrifice, discipline, and showing up.

This wasn’t wrong, exactly. It was functional. It built economies, raised families, and created stability in a world that had recently been blown apart. But embedded within it was an assumption that went largely unexamined: that joy is a destination, not a practice. Something that arrives after the work is done.

The problem is that the work is never done. There’s always another bill, another obligation, another reason to defer. And so the joy gets pushed further and further into the future until it becomes theoretical. Something you believe in but never quite experience.

Research on generational differences in work motivation found that Baby Boomers scored significantly higher than younger generations on “goal internalisation,” the tendency to adopt organisational goals as personal ones. They were the generation that most thoroughly merged their identity with their work. Their self-worth wasn’t separate from their productivity. It was their productivity.

When your identity and your output are the same thing, stopping feels like dying. And joy, the kind that has no productive function, the kind that exists only because it feels good, becomes something you don’t know how to access without guilt.

The hedonic gap

Psychologists draw a distinction between two types of wellbeing. Hedonic wellbeing is about pleasure, positive emotion, and satisfaction. Eudaimonic wellbeing is about meaning, purpose, and functioning well. Both matter. Both contribute to a good life.

But the generation raised in the 60s and 70s was trained almost exclusively in the eudaimonic register. Meaning through work. Purpose through family. Functioning through discipline. The hedonic dimension, daily pleasure, spontaneous joy, the simple act of savouring a moment because it feels good, was treated as frivolous. A luxury. Something for people who hadn’t grown up yet.

Laura Carstensen’s research at Stanford has found that older adults who prioritise emotional wellbeing and focus on savouring positive experiences report higher life satisfaction. They concentrate on what feels good rather than what feels productive. They let go of acquisition-oriented goals and lean into present-moment enjoyment.

But here’s the catch. This shift happens naturally with age only when people allow it to happen. The people who are still running the old operating system, the one that says joy must be earned, resist the shift. They keep working, keep striving, keep deferring, because the instruction they received in childhood was clear: you don’t get to enjoy yourself until you’ve finished. And you never finish.

What savoring actually does

Research on savoring interventions in older adults found that participants who completed a one-week savoring programme showed improvements in psychological resilience, reductions in depressive symptoms, and increases in happiness. These effects held at one-month and three-month follow-ups.

Savoring is the capacity to attend to, appreciate, and enhance positive experiences as they happen. It’s not gratitude, exactly, though they’re related. It’s more like the skill of staying with a good moment instead of immediately moving on to the next task.

A study by Growney, Carstensen, and English examining momentary savoring across the adult lifespan found that older adults were more likely to report savoring when experiencing high levels of positive affect. But this tendency wasn’t automatic. It was associated with being present with close social partners and with higher trait-level psychological wellbeing. In other words, the people who savored were the ones who had already given themselves permission to do so.

The people who hadn’t? They were too busy. Still earning. Still deferring. Still operating on the original instruction.

The guilt of enjoyment

I think this is the part that doesn’t get discussed enough. For many people who grew up in the 60s and 70s, joy without justification produces guilt. Genuine, somatic guilt. The kind that tightens the chest and whispers that you’re being irresponsible.

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, tracking people for over 85 years, found that the happiest older adults were those who had invested in close relationships and meaningful activities. Robert Waldinger, the study’s director, noted that beyond basic financial security, wealth doesn’t meaningfully increase wellbeing. The things people spent their lives chasing, the markers of success they were taught to believe would deliver happiness, often didn’t.

But telling someone who spent forty years earning the right to be happy that happiness was available all along is a complicated message. It can feel like an indictment rather than a liberation. It can sound like you’re saying their sacrifice was pointless. And it wasn’t pointless. It was the best strategy they had, given the instructions they were given.

The issue isn’t that they worked hard. The issue is that the model they inherited had no room for joy as a daily practice. It treated enjoyment as a reward rather than a nutrient. And when you treat a nutrient as a luxury, you end up malnourished no matter how successful you look.

The instruction underneath the instruction

In Buddhism, there’s a concept called sukha, which is usually translated as happiness or bliss but more precisely means a kind of deep, settled contentment. The Pali texts describe it not as something you achieve after a long period of striving but as something that arises naturally when you stop fighting with the present moment.

The instruction the 60s and 70s generation received was the opposite of sukha. It was dukkha instruction: happiness through effort, through control, through deferred gratification. And that instruction is so deep in their operating system that many of them can’t distinguish between discipline and deprivation. Between delayed gratification and the absence of gratification altogether.

Research from USC found that one reason older adults become happier is that they spend less time doing things they don’t enjoy and more time with people and activities they actually like. They have more control over their time. They’ve stopped agreeing to things that drain them.

But this shift requires something that the 60s and 70s model didn’t include: the belief that your enjoyment matters. Not as a reward. Not as a break from the real business of living. But as the point itself.

Rewriting the instruction

I watch my father-in-law sometimes, and I see a man who has done everything right by the standard he was given. He provided. He endured. He showed up every single day. And he has no practice of joy. Not because he’s incapable of it. Because nobody ever told him it was his to have.

I’m in my late thirties, and I can feel the echo of that instruction in myself. The guilt when I take a morning off. The restlessness when there’s nothing urgent. The nagging sense that if I’m not producing something, I’m wasting something.

But here’s what the research keeps saying, in study after study, across decades and demographics: the people who learn to enjoy their days, not just their achievements, live longer, feel better, and are more present for the people they love.

Joy isn’t a reward. It’s a practice. And the people who grew up being told otherwise aren’t broken. They’re just running software that needs an update.

The update isn’t about doing less. It’s about believing that what you feel matters as much as what you produce. That a good Tuesday is as important as a good career. That savouring your coffee in the morning, really tasting it, really being there for it, isn’t laziness.

It’s the whole point.