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But even here the hippies’ influence can be seen, believes Dr Farrar: “In 1967 teenagers saw their parents doing soulless jobs and being bullied by the boss. At first they rejected work totally, but as they got older and needed to pay the bills they instead changed the way workplaces operated. Firms such as Bill Gates’s Microsoft, for instance, are infused with hippy principles. You have a basketball hoop in the corner, you can wear shorts. New ideas from junior staff are welcomed. That ‘thinking out of the box’ phrase common in modern business is a hippy mantra.”
He adds that rather than go into unfulfilling jobs for the money, many hippies entered more people-focused professions, such as education, care work and the voluntary sector, which have subsequently expanded rapidly. Could anyone in the 1950s have considered making a living as a “life coach”?
One in five of our respondents would consider “downshifting” or dropping out of their career, something largely unheard of among the generations prior to the Sixties. Sally Beauchant, 50, from Eastbourne, changed jobs from bookkeeper to masseuse a year ago. “I’d been doing jobs I wasn’t interested in all my life. Then I started doing yoga to help a back problem, got into Eastern philosophy and things spun off from there. I thought, ‘Never mind the money, just do what you want to do.’ ” Student Emma Hobson intends to shun a lucrative role at a big corporation for a small, “ethical” company in Brighton when she finishes her business degree.
If Britons have absorbed many of the late Sixties generation’s political and social views, they’ve taken on much of the lifestyle too. Three-quarters of our poll respondents have shopped in a health food store, 70 per cent favour natural, unprocessed goods and more than half have tried natural therapies. A quarter have followed a vegan or vegetarian diet.
“Hippies were among the first people to travel to Eastern countries and bring back their ways of healing and eating,” says John McCleary. “Since then, slowly but surely, people have decided they like them—a film like the anti-fast-food Super Size Me is an extension of hippy philosophy.”
Like Sally Beauchant, we are also willing to accept non-Christian belief systems promoted by the Flower Power generation. “When hippies reported back from places such as India, we became far less spiritually insular,” says Dr Donnelly. We found that 22 per cent of Britons now believe in astrology and 27 per cent accept elements of Buddhism and other Eastern/alternative religions. Nineteen per cent of us enjoy yoga and 23 per cent meditation.
Hippies were often able to explore these new cultures because the generous student grants of the 1960s enabled them to travel. But surprisingly, only seven per cent of our poll respondents have taken a year out to go travelling (including 11 per cent of under-30s) and this perhaps reflects more financially pragmatic times.
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