Resilience has become the great virtue of our age. Be resilient. Bounce back. Show grit. Adapt. Overcome. Persist.
It sounds empowering. It’s often exhausting.
Dr. Lisa Rodriguez has been a nurse for fifteen years. During the pandemic, she worked seventy-hour weeks, watched patients die alone, held her fear and grief while showing up every day. Her hospital administration kept sending emails about resilience. “Practice self-care,” they said. “Build your resilience skills.”
What they didn’t say: We’re understaffed, underpaying you, and expecting you to endure conditions that shouldn’t exist. Your exhaustion isn’t a personal failing. It’s a structural problem. But instead of fixing the structure, we’re going to tell you to be more resilient.
This is the problem with resilience. It’s been weaponized. What started as a recognition that humans can adapt to hardship has become an excuse to create hardship and blame people for struggling with it.
The term comes from materials science. It describes the ability of a material to absorb stress and return to its original form. Applied to humans, it’s meant to capture our ability to survive trauma and difficulty.
But humans aren’t materials. We don’t just bounce back. We absorb damage. We carry scars. And some things shouldn’t require resilience. They should just not happen.
When corporations cut staff and expect the remaining workers to do more with less, they call it “building a resilient workforce.” When schools underfund mental health services and tell struggling students to be tougher, they call it “teaching resilience.” When the economy makes basic stability nearly impossible for young people, we tell them to be more adaptable.
In each case, resilience language shifts responsibility from systems to individuals. The problem isn’t the exploitative working conditions. It’s your inability to handle them. The problem isn’t the lack of support. It’s your lack of coping skills. The problem isn’t the impossible economic circumstances. It’s your failure to adapt.
This is what philosopher Michel Foucault called “responsibilization.” We take structural problems and reframe them as personal challenges. We make individuals responsible for outcomes that are shaped by forces beyond their control.
The research on actual resilience is more complicated than the self-help industry admits. Yes, some people handle adversity better than others. But resilience isn’t primarily a personality trait. It’s a product of resources.
People are resilient when they have financial stability, when they have supportive relationships, when they have access to healthcare and housing and food. Remove those material supports and even the grittiest person will struggle.
This matters because it means resilience interventions that focus on mindset or skills without addressing material conditions are essentially useless. Teaching a homeless person positive thinking doesn’t help as much as giving them housing. Telling a burned-out worker to practice gratitude doesn’t help as much as reasonable working hours and fair pay.
There’s also a darker side to resilience culture. It normalizes suffering. When we celebrate people who overcome terrible circumstances, we often forget to ask why those circumstances existed in the first place.
We praise the teacher who spends her own money on classroom supplies instead of asking why schools are so underfunded. We applaud the cancer patient who stays positive instead of questioning why medical care is so expensive. We admire the single parent working three jobs instead of demanding living wages and affordable childcare.
This praise for resilience becomes a substitute for justice. We make heroes out of people surviving circumstances that should never exist, and in doing so, we let ourselves off the hook for changing those circumstances.
None of this means resilience is bad. The capacity to endure difficulty, to adapt to hardship, to recover from trauma, these are important human capabilities. We should develop them. We should honor them.
But we should also recognize their limits. Some things break people, and that’s not their fault. Some difficulties shouldn’t be endured. They should be eliminated. Some adaptation is not strength but surrender.
The goal shouldn’t be infinite resilience. It should be building a world that requires less of it.
Dr. Rodriguez eventually quit nursing. She wasn’t lacking in resilience. She was lacking in reasonable working conditions. The problem wasn’t her. It was the system. And all the resilience in the world couldn’t fix that.