This prose poem and its 45 lines of self-improving life advice hung anywhere there was Flower Power.
Its ornately calligraphed words began: ''Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.''
Sigh. Typically, Desiderata (translates as ''necessary stuff'') was illustrated with daisies, puffy white clouds, and possibly gambolling lambs.
The poster bore the solemn footnote ''From a Baltimore churchyard, 1692'', which added a timelessness to its words.
Desiderata was up with the Che Guevara poster as a best seller, and a San Francisco DJ won a Grammy just for reading it out loud. (To be fair, he had a background choir intone its most sacred line: ''You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars.'')
Then came an awkward discovery. Desiderata wasn't actually venerable churchyard wisdom.
It had been written quite recently by an, by um, (Lord, this was embarrassing), by an accountant.
True, the bean counter was dead, but still ...
If you haven't read Desiderata make sure you do. Admire it, learn it backwards, commit it to heart.
But know its eloquent wisdom won't make a jot of difference to the way you live your life.
A few days later, you will still be the same old you, as I am the same old me.
Our boomer generation was not just here to change the world. We needed to understand our inner selves.
That was partly the point of the drugs, and certainly the reason for an explosion of self-improvement books.
If we loaded these books' instructions into our brains, we could make ourselves sexier, wiser, richer, happier, skinnier, holier - in short, become the people we aren't.
Personal improvement is the $10 billion a year industry that swamped the bookshop shelves and monstered the publishing business.
Many of the titles are usefully practical Excel for Dummies, Sewing for Boys, The Pig Hunter's Handbook.
But a huge chunk is psychobabble, written by self-promoting, unqualified charlatans who claim they'll help us change ourselves deeply. Which is nonsense.
We are simply flukes of the universe.
Malcolm Turnbull, the rich and terribly brainy new Australian Prime Minister, acknowledged this in a recent ''aw shucks'' television moment.
Asked how he'd made himself so ridiculously wealthy, (he leaves John Key in the poorhouse), he said it was mostly the dumb luck of what he was born with.
We may shake our rattles indignantly, but we have no say in the genes we're allotted at birth, and next, no control of the nurture which shapes us.
As has been said, character is fate, and the forks in the road where we do have choices are mostly blind corners.
I suppose this means the great and the good can take maybe 20% of the credit for what they are - as can the rest of us.
I know this viewpoint is disgracefully negative.
We're all meant to be squirrels who eagerly gather the nuts of wisdom.
I'm writing about it because, depressingly, I've just finished a bookshelf clean-out and seen all my own idiot self-help books.
True, these were mainly bought for my company's ''staff collection'' - but the fact is I was its chief librarian.
There are occasional improvement books tempered by droll, self-aware humour (for some reason, these are mainly written by middle class women), but the personal change industry is probably 90% useless.
Nevertheless, I shall polish up my advice licence and offer some key wisdoms to assist you along life's way,
Don't wear suede shoes when cooking.
At bedtime, it's better not to take both a laxative and a sleeping pill.
Never give up an opportunity to remain silent.
Wear a box, even if batting for the other side.
It's not about your weight, silly - it's whether your pants fit.
And from Yogi Berra, the baseball philosopher who died last month: ''Go to other people's funerals. Otherwise they won't come to yours.''
John Lapsley is an Arrowtown writer.
