My dad worked in a factory outside Manchester. When something broke in our house, he fixed it. Not because he was particularly handy, but because calling someone to fix it cost money we didn’t have. So he’d figure it out. Take it apart, study the problem, put it back together. Sometimes it took three attempts. Sometimes the fix involved duct tape and a creative interpretation of how the thing was supposed to work.
But it got done.
I didn’t think much about this growing up. It was just how life worked. You made do. If your shoes had a hole, you got them repaired, not replaced. If you wanted something you couldn’t afford, you either found a way to build it or you went without. Nobody called this a philosophy. Nobody put it on a blog and called it “intentional living.”
It was just Tuesday.
But looking back, that way of growing up gave people something that’s become genuinely rare. And research is starting to explain why.
Constraint breeds a specific kind of intelligence
When you grow up without much, your brain learns to solve problems differently. You can’t just throw money at something. You can’t order a replacement part with next-day delivery. You have to think.
Psychologist Albert Bandura spent decades studying what he called self-efficacy, the belief in your own ability to figure things out and influence outcomes. His research, first published in 1977 and expanded over the following decades, found that this belief is built primarily through what he called “mastery experiences.” Repeated encounters with problems you successfully solve, even imperfectly, wire your brain to approach the next challenge with confidence rather than helplessness.
Children who grew up in lower-middle-class and working-class households in the 1960s and 70s were getting these mastery experiences daily without anyone designing them. Every broken appliance, every tight budget, every improvised solution was a quiet lesson in capability.
Boredom was the original incubator
There’s a detail about growing up in that era that doesn’t get enough credit. There was nothing to do.
No internet. No smartphones. Three television channels if you were lucky. On school holidays, you were essentially told to go outside and not come back until tea time. And in that vast, unstructured emptiness, something happened.
You invented things. You built things. You made games out of nothing and turned a cardboard box into something your imagination needed it to be.
Research on self-efficacy and human functioning has consistently found that people who believe they can solve problems are more likely to actually solve them, and that this belief is strengthened through active engagement with challenges rather than passive consumption. The boredom of those decades wasn’t a flaw. It was a feature. It forced a generation of children to develop their own internal resources before anyone had even named the concept.
Watching adults improvise taught more than any lesson could
I learned more about problem-solving from watching my parents and their friends navigate life on tight budgets than I did from any textbook. My mother worked in retail and somehow managed to stretch every pound further than it had any right to go. She didn’t have a system. She had instinct, born from necessity.
Bandura called this “vicarious learning,” the process of developing confidence and capability by observing people similar to you handle challenges. When a child watches a parent fix something instead of buying a new one, repurpose something instead of throwing it away, or negotiate a solution instead of accepting a bad outcome, they absorb a fundamental lesson: problems are solvable.
That lesson gets coded deep. And it shows up decades later in how people approach everything from work crises to personal setbacks.
The “make do” mindset was never about deprivation
Here’s what gets lost when people romanticise the past. Nobody enjoyed being skint. Nobody thought poverty was character-building while they were in it. The “make do” culture wasn’t a lifestyle choice. It was a response to real economic constraint.
But what it produced, as a side effect, was a population of people who developed what psychologists now call problem-focused coping. Rather than spiralling into anxiety about what’s missing, you take practical action with whatever’s available. That approach builds competence. And competence builds confidence.
I’ve mentioned this before, but running my own business taught me more about how the world works than any job ever did. Cash flow problems, impossible deadlines, clients who disappeared. And every time I found a solution, it drew on the same instinct I’d watched my parents model: assess what you’ve got, figure out what you can do with it, and get moving.
The rebranding nobody asked for
Here’s where things get slightly irritating.
Everything that generation did out of necessity has been repackaged and sold back to a wealthier audience as a lifestyle trend. Repairing clothes instead of replacing them? That’s “slow fashion” now. Eating seasonally because that’s what was available? “Farm to table.” Using things until they fall apart? “Sustainability.”
These are good principles. I’m not arguing against them. But there’s a difference between choosing to live simply because you read about it in a weekend supplement and living that way because you had no other option. The first is a preference. The second is a survival skill that gets hardwired into how you think.
The generation that grew up lower-middle class in the 60s and 70s didn’t learn resourcefulness from a TED talk. They learned it from a childhood where the alternative to figuring things out was doing without. And that kind of learning doesn’t fade.
Why this matters now more than ever
We’re living through a period of genuine economic uncertainty. Psychological research on self-efficacy tells us that people with a strong belief in their ability to handle challenges experience lower levels of stress and depression and are more resilient in the face of setbacks.
That’s not a personality trait. It’s a skill. One that was accidentally mass-produced by the conditions of a particular time and place.
The question worth asking is whether we can cultivate those same instincts without requiring people to grow up with less. Can we teach resourcefulness in an age of abundance? Can we create space for the kind of unstructured problem-solving that used to happen naturally in every working-class household?
I think we can. But it requires something uncomfortable. It requires stepping back and letting people, especially children, struggle a bit before swooping in with a solution. My dad didn’t teach me to fix things by explaining how. He taught me by letting me watch him try, fail, and try again.
The quiet advantage nobody talks about
There’s one more thing worth mentioning. Bandura’s research found that the most powerful source of self-efficacy is direct experience, not instruction, not encouragement, not watching someone else succeed, but doing it yourself and seeing that it worked.
People who grew up lower-middle class in the 60s and 70s got thousands of these experiences before they turned eighteen. Every patched tyre, every repurposed piece of furniture, every meal made from whatever was left in the cupboard was a tiny deposit into a psychological bank account that would pay dividends for decades.
That’s the quiet advantage. Not education. Not connections. Not inherited wealth. Just the deep, bone-level belief that when something goes wrong, you can probably figure it out. Because you’ve been figuring things out since you were seven years old, standing next to your dad while he took apart the washing machine for the third time that year.
The bottom line
Growing up without much wasn’t romantic. It wasn’t always fun. And I’d never argue that anyone should have less just to build character.
But the research is clear. The conditions of those decades accidentally created one of the most resourceful generations in modern history. People who default to action instead of anxiety. People who see a broken thing and think “I can probably fix that” before thinking anything else.
That instinct is valuable. It always has been. The only difference now is that someone has given it a name, put it on a podcast, and started charging for workshops on how to develop it.
Some of us just call it growing up.
As always, I hope you found some value in this post.
Until next time.
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