Friday Thread: Theories of Resilience

Resilience requires a kind of elasticity, an ability to stretch and reach but then to return, to spring back into a former shape—or perhaps to shapeshift into something new if the circumstances require it. Resilience is stretchy where optimization is brittle; resilience invites change where optimization demands continuity. But whether we’re talking

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As Diane Coutu so eloquently explains in her luminous “How Resilience Works,” “Resilient people possess three characteristics — a staunch acceptance of reality; a deep belief, often buttressed by strongly held values, that life is meaningful; and an uncanny ability to improvise. You can bounce back from hardship with just one or two of these qualit

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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... See more

On a week like this, I find myself oscillating between two strategies: staring directly at the crisis, and seeking temporary and necessary reprieve from it.

Recent events have completely exposed the limits of individual agency, creating a powerful demand for squad-based forms of resiliency.

confront a kind of resilience that isn’t really about returning back to the way you were before, but is much more about reclaiming whatever new shape your form has taken. A resilience that doesn’t really ask us to forget, but that carries the memory of whatever harm or whatever fire we’ve been through. A resilience that carries that memory and stil... See more