Friday Thread: Theories of Resilience
I was talking to a friend about what it felt like to come through a stressful set of weeks. They’d made it to the end of their most intense obligations, but found themselves flummoxed by the smallest annoyances: the dog wanting to go out at a time that wasn’t normal, a slight delay from road construction, Starbucks running out of Spinach-Feta Wraps. “I just have no resilience,” they said.
I thought that was a really effective way of framing the feeling of hitting the wall and being forced to still keep climbing. Or, to use another metaphor, of draining the tank. You know you can’t just collapse, so you have to run on fumes until you gradually refill yourself. When you’re out of resilience, it’s so much easier to get sick, to mess-up small details, to miss things, to say the wrong thing. When people say that bad things happen in threes, my secret theory is that it’s because the first thing drains all of your resilience, and then you’re more susceptible to all manner of catastrophe.
I think most of us have experienced this lack of resilience in some way. Maybe you’re experiencing it now. It’s part of the conversation about poverty (when you’re dealing with constant pressures of precarity, studies have shown that you also lose the ability to make the “good” decisions that might mitigate some of that precarity) and intensive parenting (because too much parenting and surveillance means kids don’t have the time to develop resilience in the first place).
I’m fascinated by this topic, and how so many aspects and norms and practices of modern life make it difficult to develop resilience, let alone sustain it. So I wanted to open it up to the larger Culture Study community.
How resilient do you feel right now? How has that changed from different points in your life? What makes you feel more or less resilient — and what do you do when you realize you need more of it?
If you’re a caregiver — parent, teacher, person who spends a lot of time with kids — how do you think about resilience as a life skill?
Should we be thinking more about cultivating resilience….or more about cultivating a society that requires less of it? (And how has complimenting someone/a group of people for being “resilient” become a way of not grappling with the larger societal forces that have forced them to become so)
….or feel free to take this in any other direction you’d like.
As always, this is a private, subscriber-only space; this is the sort of discussion that could easily turn quietly ugly, so be mindful about the way you’re talking about your resilience and others and let’s keep this one of the good places on the internet.