Learning to better cope with unjust conditions is not resilience – it leads to burnout

A lot of people have a mixed reaction to the word ‘resilience’. Quite often, they even recoil a little when I bring it up because something about that word sits uncomfortably in the body. There is something grotesque about the idea of becoming even more resilient in an ever more oppressive world, particularly if you belong to a group of people whose only ever praise by the dominant culture is their resilience in the face of oppression (above all, Palestinians). When you think about the associations many of us have with the idea of resilience, this reticence makes total sense.  

In a system of a so-called ‘meritocracy’ where everyone is supposedly assessed according to their effort and capability alone - even though we know this is an illusion and an ideology that has been used to justify indefensible levels of wealth hoarding and economic inequality – your struggles become your own fault.

It implies that if you’re having a hard time, it means you’re not trying hard enough. It says that you not thriving has nothing to do with the rise of fascism, your housing conditions, your family’s access to wealth or the lack thereof, your employment rights, the quality of the healthcare you receive or how you are treated by society. Rather than seeing your own experience as being shaped by all of those things and many more, meritocracy encourages you to focus on your own actions as the only factor determining what your life looks like.

This is completely delusional. We know from research in public health that individual behaviour accounts for only about 40% of health outcomes for a person. These individual behaviours, in turn, are influenced by socioeconomic factors (say, whether you can eat fresh food depends on there being shops in your area that sell it and you having the money to buy it, the time to cook it and so on). So, the extent to which your individual actions shape your health outcomes is in fact probably much smaller than 40%.

Photo of a decorative bicycle made of metal and painted in blue with silver flowers petals instead of spokes being held up on a thin blue stick in front of a grey wall.

Still, I meet many people who are struggling and place the blame on themselves. Rather than focusing their attention on the sources of stress in their lives, they have internalised a capitalistic, colonial and deeply individualistic notion of resilience that equates struggle with weakness.

It sounds something like this: If I just get better at ‘sleep hygiene’, meditate regularly, do some yoga during our lunch break or change our diet, I’ll be able to get my act together. Maria Mena, who made up the musical soundtrack of my teenage years, wrote a haunting song about what that feels like back in 2004. Since then, the number of supposed wellbeing ‘hacks’ that have piled up out there is staggering.

They are trying to sell us a version of resilience that is completely separated from the rest of the world and gives us the illusion of control.

From a social justice perspective, this is really dangerous. What I’ve learnt from The Resilience Toolkit Training Alliance is that if we disconnect resilience from the context in which a person lives, we are effectively expecting that person to compensate for the circumstances that are causing their stress in the first place. Which is impossible for anyone to do.

Resilience is never an individual issue. Yes, people have varying degrees of personal resilience that are connected to a whole bunch of factors and change over time, but beyond that, we are all interconnected. What happens to one of us impacts all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not. We can’t change the systems that are creating so much injustice and suffering on our own - we will all burn out if we try that. And many of us have.

Instead, resilience is about our collective capacity to change the conditions around us. It’s what Nkem Ndefo calls ‘alchemical resilience’ – the things that become possible when all of us create a bit more spaciousness inside of ourselves and for each other. It’s a bouncing forward together, not an infinite bouncing back on our own to face the same conditions over and over again.

This is why I’ve attended every single Palestine solidarity march in London I could get to since the start of the genocide in Gaza. There is an immense power in tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people gathering to tell our political leaders ‘not in our name’. It’s about understanding that we can’t bear this on our own – we need each other in our anger, in our grief, in our helplessness and in our hope so that we can continue to be active witnesses and voices of dissent.

In my experience, something alchemical happens in those spaces. Over the weekend, anti-racism protesters were trapped in Whitehall while the far-right crowd that had descended on London had us cornered from every angle. (Why this was allowed to happen when, just a week before, police arrested nearly 900 people for holding up pieces of paper expressing their opposition to genocide is a topic for another post.)

As we waited for hours for police to clear a corridor for us to leave, people started to dance, turning what was in many ways a scary and inconvenient situation into one of joyful defiance. Rather than waiting anxiously by staring on our phones, people changed the conditions around them to create a completely different experience for everyone. It felt like collective resilience.

We don’t always have the option to do what the organisers at this march did and transform a crowd of damp and hungry protesters into a dance party. But what we always have is a bit of room, often bigger than we think, to choose how we respond to a situation and figure out if there is something we can do together to change the conditions around us so that something else becomes possible.

When we do this on a collective level, whole new worlds become possible. Meritocracy doesn’t incentivise this way of being because it’s not about individual credit. There is something deeply freeing about orienting away from our own ‘success’ and towards the ways in which we can change together – even if the media won’t report it.