“The Profound Emptiness of ‘Resilience’”
“Deriving from the Latin for ‘‘to jump again,’’ ‘‘resilience’’ has sprung into new life as a catchword in international development and Silicon Valley and among parenting pundits and TED-heads. Hundreds of books have been published on the topic this year, mostly with a focus on toughening up your investment portfolio or your toddler. We’ve seen encomiums to the resilience of Paris and Beirut after terrorist attacks — but also to Justin Bieber, after his weepy comeback performance at the MTV Video Music Awards. It’s a word that is somehow so conveniently vacant that it manages to be profound and profoundly hollow…
it is indistinguishable from classic American bootstrap logic when it is applied to individuals, placing all the burden of success and failure on a person’s character. ‘‘It’s pretty much the same message that’s drummed into us by Aesop’s fables, Benjamin Franklin’s aphorisms, Christian denunciations of sloth and the 19th-century chant invented to make children do their homework: ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,’ ’’ the social scientist Alfie Kohn argued in an op-ed article in The Washington Post. ‘‘The more we focus on whether people have or lack persistence (or self-discipline more generally), the less likely we’ll be to question larger policies.’’
Resonating so much. “Why rise from the ashes without asking why you had to burn?” is basically my life motto right now.
A while ago, someone on Facebook posted a meme that said “just because I’m strong doesn’t mean I deserve pain”. I’d been thinking that a lot, and I’ve been thinking about it since posting; I’ve started writing an essay on the topic, kind of just to sort my thoughts out, might publish it eventually… But essentially, I’ve become incredibly frustrated with the idea of being a ‘strong’ person, and I’ve become frustrated with the people who call me strong when I’m doing something hard that they admire (but don’t want to help me with) and then, even in the same conversation, call me sensitive when I’m dealing with something hard that they don’t recognize to be hard.
The use of these terms, and our value for them, is so poorly examined.
I recently helped to hold a community dialogue in Palo Alto on the definition of “resilience”, and it was fascinating to see that almost every group came back with understandings of resilience that included community and support networks. And a lot of groups also came back with something about vulnerability — the ability to both name and communicate your emotions and problems. And, thought it wasn’t mentioned, these needs imply a third need to complete the triangle: The need for sensitive community members who can observe others’ emotions and respond to them.
But in a world where we only have strong-resilient people, full of independence and with a wall between themselves and the thoughts and feelings of other people (because you can’t really selectively shut yourself off to the haters but still be totally open to your loved ones), we don’t have what we actually need for resilience. And in a world where people who are trying to be vulnerable are immediately given a stigmatized “sensitive” label, we also don’t have people practicing sensitivity with each other, and we lose that interpersonal support.
