NY Times Article Arguing That Resilience is Overrated Misses the Point Completely
I write about resilience often. My interest in the topic started when my sons started on their youth wrestling journey. Wrestling is one of the few sports that requires athletes to learn how to lose before they can win anything meaningful. This characteristic of the sport, among others, makes youth wrestling the perfect sport for raising resilient children.
With that said, as I was browsing LinkedIn this morning I came across an article from the NY Times titled Is Resilience Overrated? I was immediately intrigued by the title because of my strong advocacy of the importance of resilience. In this article, the author states:
People are being asked to be exceptional to get something less than exceptional in return: a basic standard of living. What is resilience anyway but an unfair exchange of energy.
This particular quote made it clear to me that the author was missing the point completely. Maybe this was intentional to get clicks. I know the business model of the NY Times depends on controversial headlines. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t say my peace to push back on the utter lack of understanding the author has on why resilience is not an “unfair exchange of energy.”
Resilience Starts with Your “Internal Locus of Control”
Much of the argument made by the NY Times author was that society focuses too much on resilience, and as a result lets the government off the hook. The author tries to make the case that society is shaming people into fixing their own problems instead of forcing the government to do its job.
The point the author misses is these things are one in the same. The government not only represents the people, the government is the people. What’s more, being resilient is the act of taking power into your own hands. Or to put it differently, having what psychologist like to call an “internal locus of control”.
When you have an internal locus of control you don’t depend on hope, luck, or other external factors to achieve a goal. You depend strictly on the factors that are within your control and maximize progress using those factors only. In the case of dealing with society’s problems, this means showing resilience by exercising both civic and personal responsibility.
Society is not overrating resilience just because people have been taught that exercising personal responsibility is better than exercising civic responsibility. In my opinion, both are equally important. I think a better argument is that people are underrating their ability to be resilient in their civic responsibility. If people want the government to do more, then they must be more resilient in exercising their locus of control within the government. This is the lesson that needs teaching.
The author of the NY Times article ends with a question:
Are we fixing the right problems when we are teaching the importance of resilience?
My answer is unquestionably YES! In short, you can’t fix any meaningfully difficult problem without resilience. So, if you aren’t resilient you can’t fix difficult problems. It’s really that simple.