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 to be home before the streetlights came on. No phone, no way to reach me, no idea where I’d end up. Some days I’d ride my bike to the quarry. Other days I’d end up at the basketball court or down by the railroad tracks looking for bottles to return for the deposit. Most days I didn’t know where I was going until I got there.
I get why things changed. I understand why parents today wouldn’t dream of that kind of hands-off approach. Too much can go wrong, too many dangers we know about now that we were blissfully ignorant of then. But I keep thinking about what gets lost when a kid never has the chance to be truly, completely alone with his own thoughts and the empty hours ahead of him.
We were bored a lot back then. Not the kind of boredom kids talk about now when their tablet needs charging or the WiFi goes down. I mean the deep, existential boredom of a Wednesday afternoon in July when you’d already been to the corner store twice, thrown rocks at cans for an hour, and still had six hours until dinner. You’d lie on your back in the grass until the clouds started looking like things, then you’d get up and walk to your buddy’s house just to see if he was as bored as you were.
Sometimes that boredom produced trouble. We’d dare each other to climb the water tower or sneak into abandoned buildings. We’d build ramps for our bikes that no parent in their right mind would approve of. I split my chin open twice one summer trying to jump over trash cans.
But more often, that boredom produced something else. We’d start building a fort in the woods and spend three weeks on it, adding walls, digging trenches, creating elaborate defensive positions against enemies that existed only in our heads. We’d invent complicated games with rules that made sense only to us. I remember spending an entire August creating a baseball league where I played every position on every team, keeping statistics in a notebook I still have somewhere in the attic.
The key wasn’t just the freedom to roam. It was the absence of observation. Nobody was watching, nobody was checking in, nobody was documenting anything. If you wanted to spend three hours throwing a tennis ball against a brick wall, you could do that without anyone asking if you were okay or suggesting something more productive. If you wanted to sit by the creek and think about nothing, or everything, or that girl in math class, you had that space.
My own father was a pipefitter, left before dawn, came home after dark. My mother worked part-time at the parish office and had two kids and a house to run. They loved us, but they didn’t have time to orchestrate our lives. We were expected to figure things out, solve our own problems, entertain ourselves. If we got in a fight with another kid, we had to work it out or avoid them. If we got lost, we had to find our way home. If we were bored, that was our problem to solve.
I learned things in those unsupervised hours that I don’t think I could have learned any other way. I learned how to judge people and situations without an adult there to tell me what was safe and what wasn’t. I learned to trust my gut when something felt off. I learned that I could walk for hours and not get lost, that I could make friends with kids from different neighborhoods, that I could spend an entire afternoon by myself and not feel lonely.
There was a quality to time back then that’s hard to describe. It moved slower, but not in a bad way. An afternoon could feel like a week. Summer felt endless. You’d start walking with no destination in mind and end up somewhere you’d never been before, and that was just part of the day. No photos, no posts, no proof it happened except your own memory.
When I try to explain this to younger people, they often focus on the wrong things. They think I’m romanticizing the past or complaining about smartphones. But that’s not it. The technology isn’t the point. The point is the experience of being truly unwatched, of having space in your life that no adult could see into, of dealing with boredom so profound that you had to create something from nothing just to get through it.
Here’s the part I’m not supposed to say: the surveillance is worse than the dangers it prevents. I know how that sounds. I know the statistics about kids who got hurt, who disappeared, who never made it home. I’m not pretending those kids didn’t exist. But a childhood spent under constant observation produces a particular kind of adult: one who has never had a thought nobody could see, never solved a problem alone, never sat with himself long enough to find out who he is when nobody’s looking.
That’s not safety. That’s something else.
My grandson is a good kid. Smart, curious, capable. But I watch him and his friends, and they seem somehow smaller than we were at that age. Not physically, but in some other way I can’t quite name. They’re more protected, more comfortable, more connected. They’ll never know the specific loneliness of a rainy Thursday with nothing to do and nobody around. They’ll never have to figure out how to fill five empty hours with nothing but their imagination and whatever they can find in the garage.
So here’s the question I can’t shake: what happens to a generation that has never been alone? Not lonely. Alone. Off the grid. Unaccounted for. Out of pocket for an entire afternoon with no one able to find them and no one expecting them to check in.
I don’t know. Nobody knows. We’ve never run that experiment before.
But I’d bet my recliner that whatever those kids become, they’ll spend a good part of their adult lives trying to find the quiet we were handed for free.
