We keep asking people to become more resilient.
Perhaps the deeper question is not whether people are resilient enough, but what keeps requiring so much endurance from them.
Because there is a point where resilience becomes a polite word for survival.
Endure the pace, the pressure, the loneliness, the system that treats your body as an afterthought, your grief as inconvenient, your care responsibilities as private, your limits as weakness, and your exhaustion as something to manage better next quarter.
Then, when the cost becomes visible, we hand it back to the individual.
🤔 Stress becomes their problem.
🤔 Burnout becomes their problem.
🤔 Poor health becomes their problem.
🤔 Loneliness becomes their problem.
🤔 Conflict becomes their problem.
We have become very skilled at personalizing the consequences of social design.
That does not mean personal response-ability is irrelevant. It means responsibility has been made too small.
A person does not live in isolation from the conditions around them.
The food available, the work expected, the care accessible, the streets designed, the technology used, the pace normalized, the stories repeated, and the tenderness permitted all enter the body eventually.
This is the ground of a new essay series I’m beginning:
A New Vision for Society.
It asks what becomes possible when we stop treating human breakdown as inevitable and begin looking at the systems, stories, and structures that shape people long before crisis arrives.
The systems we build become the lives we live.
And perhaps the future asks something more honest of us than resilience alone.
Perhaps it asks us to shape a society where fewer people are left carrying too much, for too long, in silence.