The Resilience Myth
On not powering through
A few winters ago, a massive storm hit the island and rattled the windows and froze everyone’s pipes for around three days. During mild to moderate weather catastrophes I’m the sort of person who becomes an annoying optimist (the power’s out, but at least we have a gas stove!!) but it really shook my partner Charlie. We’d been on the island at that point for more than a year, but the pandemic was still raging and we’d met few people outside of the people we already knew when we arrived….and they were off-island. It felt isolating and terrifying.
My response to those emotions was to make elaborate plans to fortify the house. Most importantly, we got a generator. We replaced the crappy windows that allowed the cold wind to sail right in through the downstairs bedroom. We used the tail-end of the tax credit to subsidize a heat pump, which would also theoretically come in handy for cooling when and if there was another ‘heat dome.’ (Most houses in this area don’t have air conditioning — there just hasn’t been a need, at least until recently).
I was using the means that I had available to try and make our household resilient. But none of those expensive improvements have made me feel nearly as protected as actually getting to know people on the island. It’s taken four years, but it’s happened. I know exactly who I’d call if something fell on my house, and I know the two other people I’d call if that first person couldn’t come. I know who has extra crutches on hand and who has EMT training and who could drive a boat to the mainland. We don’t have to be best friends to be connected and useful to one another.
We all have to be personally resilient, to some extent, to live on an island. We all have some version of stockpile. But we also have to be develop a resilience that is only achievable through our connection to each other.
That line of thinking is one of many reasons I wanted to talk to Soraya Chemaly about her new book, which sharply interrogates our veneration of individual resilience. It’s deeply informed my own thinking about what actually happens when you “power through” (or model it for others) and I can’t wait for you to read her thoughts on productivity-as-distraction, the misguided focus on students’ supposed “lack” of resilience, and how optimism fits into this line of thinking. So keep reading!
As a way of introducing readers to you and the book: can you tell us about how your understanding of resilience has changed since 2016, when your husband was diagnosed with cancer? How did you understand its place in your own life, but also how did you understand its societal importance?
I think my idea of resilience was a pretty common one in that I thought of resilience in almost entirely personal terms, as an individual characteristic or trait. Over years I had really absorbed the idea that resilience was 9/10th the ability to persevere, be gritty, try to stay optimistic, etc. and 1/10th having a supportive social circle. When my family was thrown into the deep end of a crisis, it became clear that nothing I could do as an individual could compare to what we all needed, which was a combination of love, friendship, compassionate listeners, and actual material resources, such as access to good health care and medicine.
What I concluded, after that experience and through writing this book, is that that our individual/collective resilience ratios should really be reversed or, a better formulation, that the more accurate and helpful way to think of “supportive social circles” is broadly: as the connections, material resources, and political entitlements that serve as the foundation for our individual strengths and capacities.
I’ve been reading (and writing) a lot about the cult of individualism here on the newsletter as I’ve been researching my new book, and I’m struck by how much resilience — at least a certain sort of resilience — fits into it.
People often frame the quality of resilience as evidence of greatness and deservingness (they endured; therefore, they are successful and deserve all the success that comes their way)....and as a way to avoid fixing the things that make life so hard for so many in the first place (if people can survive it, then why should we fix it?) You write about this idea so persuasively in the book, and I’m hoping you can expand here: what’s the danger in thinking of resilience in individual terms?
The word toxic gets thrown around a lot these day, which is a shame because it is really very useful! Toxic individualism is a good way to sum up our cultural obsession with the power of one person to persevere against all odds. That model means we have created a survival of the fittest ideal of resilience that impoverishes us all, both as individuals and as a society. It’s the model, I argue in the book, that undermines public health, political equality, and greater collective goods.
The danger of thinking that you and you alone are responsible for adapting positively to crisis — and today that means crises after crisis after crisis — is that you will almost certainly fail to meet your own expectations. No one is resilient alone, at all times, and in all situations. Resilience is a dynamic process and it is healthier and more accurate to say that we take turns being resilient for one another.
The crux of the cult of individualism is the belief in a hypermasculinized self-sufficiency that ends up making being human — having needs (being needy), needing to be cared for (being dependent), being vulnerable (being “weak”) — impossible.
Take, for instance, what happened at the peak of COVID, especially after vaccines were introduced. Men in particular resisted three critical measures: hand washing, mask wearing, and getting vaccinated. Men put more people at risk, and also died in higher numbers, in order to adhere to an ideal of resilience that meant seeing and portraying themselves as invulnerable, strong, impenetrable, and “dominating” the virus. As a result they got sick and died in disproportionately higher numbers. Of course, men often worked in higher exposure jobs, but researchers concluded that the death rate was also related to men conforming to a specific and individual notion of resilient masculinity.
I think many of us have arrived at a much broader understanding of the way that the physical body absorbs trauma — the *years* that Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score has sat atop the New York Times bestseller list gestures to as much — but it often strikes me that the understanding is still pretty glancing. We get that our bodies ache after a traumatic event, or that you’re tired while grieving, but we still don’t make any real allowances for it, not for ourselves and generally not for others (and certainly not in policy, workplace or otherwise).
What’s keeping us from a more fully understanding of how our bodies absorb our attempts to be individually resilient?
At its root, I’d say our resistance to giving the body its due is our culture’s unremitting investment in binary dualism. We all engage in black and white thinking, to be sure, because it helps us simplify information and make quick decisions, but the cognitive habit has become an oppressive cultural constraint. Our mainstream resilience, for example, is over-invested in the mind — optimism, grit, challenge mindset, so much of positive psychology in general. All of which makes it difficult not just to truly understand our bodies, but ourselves as bodies.
That essential Mind/Body split is woven into dichotomies in hierarchical ways: Male/Female, White/Black, Man/Nature, Being/Non-Being. The only way to really understand the complexity of our selves and how we relate to the world is to reject this way of understanding.
Allowances — for grief, for pain, for childbirth, for illness — have been so hard to come by, I think, because we discount the body. Worse, we hold it in contempt compared to the mind, a proxy for religious spirit, so that the reality and risk of cruelty and brutalization are minimized and ignored. I ended up writing an entire chapter to explain not only why the body matters but how, in fact, our bodies also counter the idea that we are, as individuals, separate and independent from one another. Neuroscience, biology, physics, and other disciplines increasingly point towards our not only being persons but interpersonal, in constant interaction with each other and the world.
I recently wrote about the criticism of today’s college students, who, like the millennials and gen-xers and boomers before them, are often framed as coddled. Same story, twentieth verse….but this time, they’re also lacking in resilience. I was relieved to come to your section on the idea of building resilience in children, and the argument that “younger people aren’t distressed because they lack the right mindset or don’t understand what is happening around them. They are distressed because the world is distressing, and adults have failed them.”
Also: that younger people are developing forms of resilience; they just don’t look like the individualistic forms we’ve seen in the past. Where do you see this happening?
I am so glad you wrote about this too! It’s a real pet peeve of mine, when people castigate younger people in this way. Recently I also wrote an article about exactly what you describe, referring to ongoing college protests in defense of peace and Palestinian rights and life. These campus protests, especially the encampments, illustrate a real cultural shift from individualistic orientations to collective ones.
As a cohort, these college students have grown up experiencing an onslaught of risks and threats that are collective and clearly out of their personal control, (the basis for so much mind-set resilience): mass gun violence, climate change, the fight for Black Lives, MeToo allegations, Covid. Their way of adapting, the way they have to be resilient, is through mutual care, listening to others, accepting difference and pluralism, and being, in core ways, other-focused. The acceleration and accumulation of overlapping crises made our interdependencies — otherwise masked in slow violence and harm — more obvious. Technology and social media also altered their experiences by exposing them to more people, different ideas, and new relationships. Their resilience, I think, is calibrated to understanding themselves as implicated subjects in ways that scolding older people refuse to understand or consider.
People know that there’s at least a small cultural expectation to take off work — if you’re able — after a trauma, or to grieve a death, or even to recover from a medical event. And maybe it’s just because I do the work I do, but I often see people working to justify their decision to do work anyway: “it’s how I distract myself,” or some version thereof. And I get it! Work is distracting! But I’m also compelled by your argument for productivity as a means of evidencing individual resilience. Can you outline it here, and say more about how it exacerbates existing divisions when it comes to power in the workplace?
Productivity is an interesting goal when it comes to resilience. It does make some people feel better — they’re keeping busy, “doing something.” Additionally, many (probably most) people have no choice but to work through difficult and sad times, crises and traumas. But in terms of resilience specifically, I think there is a clear connection between productivity and the idea of growth, with a specifically capitalist ideal distorted into an idealized arc: trauma:resilience:growth. If you suffer, and then you work, you will be improved. That may not in fact happen at all. You may, instead, be exhausted, depleted, further saddened.
This idea of productivity and working hard despite challenges and obstacles also lends itself to class divisions in the workplace. Some people are more capable of dedicating themselves to work than others; they have more resources, supplemented incomes, child care, etc. and so can literally afford to be productive in ways that other people cannot. In the book, I write about how Lean In, Confidence Code, and Girl Boss cultures easily lend themselves to this problem by focusing on an individual woman’s capacity to power through discrimination in the workplace in ways that she personally benefits from but that don’t alter the context or environment in ways that help others.
Okay this last one’s a doozy, but I think it’s going to spark some good discussion. I say this as someone who’s spent some time interrogating my own optimism: who “gets” to be optimistic? What does that optimism signify, particularly when it comes to resilience? What are we actually saying when we say: “it’s just how I see the world?”
Optimism is so vast and complicated! What I really learned was that yes, optimism is partially genetic. Yes, optimism can be learned as habit of mind. But, also, and this is something that is really worth public discussion — optimism is a reflection of status, security, safety and wealth. That may seem self-evident to some of us — because it is easier to be optimistic when life has less friction, things tend to go well, your entitlements are institutionalized — but I honestly never saw this mentioned in the vast array of “how to be resilient” content I surveyed and analyzed.
The problem with “It’s just how I see the world” is when that approach is used against others because they don’t or can’t. “It’s just how I see the world,” might be because of genes, mental discipline, or social privilege and it’s important to consider what this means before urging someone else to “look on the bright side.”
Optimism, like most things, has its limits. When it doesn’t, it tilts into delusion or even endangers people. Women in abusive relationships, for example, are often encouraged to stay with the person hurting them in the optimistic hope that “things will get better,” or “he’s not all bad,” or “you can help him change.” More often than not, that is definitely harmful advice.
My conclusion is that what we should be focusing on is cognitive flexibility. Resilient people tend to apply optimism and pessimism strategically and pragmatically. Pessimism allows us to assess risks more accurately, plan ahead to avoid them, and adapt more quickly and effectively, for example. But, you will rarely if ever hear some one tell another person, especially a child, “learn to be pessimistic.” The point is, we need to use both. ●
You find more of Soraya Chemaly’s work here and buy The Resilience Myth here.