Wednesday, January 20, 2016

"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.’’

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/12/06/magazine/the-profound-emptiness-of-resilience.html?referer=

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


FB: this touches on mental health, buzzwords, American individualism, and social justice.  Read it now! "demands for resilience have become a cleverly coded way to shame those speaking out against injustices." 

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