Your Secret Weapon for Resilience

As many bemoan the chaos of this decade, Dr. Steven Pinker reminds us that this is, by a significant margin, the safest and most productive age of the human species. The calamities we face are minor irritants in comparison to those surmounted by our fore fathers; we have difficulty overcoming a few degrees of warmth, let alone a host of real and impactful calamities that used to kill millions. 

As individuals, we possess the human instincts and physiology to live in nature, with nothing but what it provides, and thrive. However, eons ahead and with all the technological advances, as a species we express little in drive or personal constitution, continuously seek external assistance and bewilderingly, cannot thrive with the accoutrements of the 21st century. 

We see it in the literature on disasters and emergency management, this existential threat from nature, requiring behemoth levels of governmental intervention in individual lives to stave off the apocalypse. 

Where we’ve lost the narrative is at the individual level, the human animal, designed by nature to thrive in the environment. Our species is different, from the sociological viewpoint, we are the only animal that knows it is here and that life is finite. What we have done with that is the subject of a generational research body of knowledge, from behavioural economics, to psychology, sociology, anthropology - all of which are the feeding social sciences that established the paradigm of disaster and emergency management. 

Resilience is often the word used, but arguable one of the most abused terms in the discipline. No less that dozens of factually or theoretically different constructions of this terms exist in the published literature. This is not a new problem, this is a reasonably common standard in social sciences, where terms are bent to help frame an idea the researcher wishes to advance, or to correlate to their findings. Amusing to some, somewhat a challenge to those of us who lecture in the field - whose definition is correct and if there is a correct one, why are we not calling out the others?

In natural sciences, they are far more rigid in the use of terminology, hence my inclination to lean towards their definition of resilience, “the ability of an elastic material (such as rubber or animal tissue) to absorb energy (such as from a blow) and release that energy as it springs back to its original shape”. (physics 101). Some of the social science definitions trace, at least reasonably, to this concept. If we accept that frame, how does this relate to the natural human animal?

I’ve written at length about what is within the power of us to actually do, using the stoic philosophical lens that argues everything falls into one of two buckets - things we can control and that which we cannot. Now, depending on societal positions or locations, there is some ability to influence what we cannot control, but that is often limited to single events or policies. In reality, all that you or I can do is change what we can control. In simple terms, that is what we say and do. Full stop. That’s it, we can change what we say - to ourselves, in-person or online. Further, we have agency and can conduct physical actions - voter, fight, run, work, build, etc. 

So if all that we can do is what is within our control, how do we leverage that to achieve resilience, which by definition will enable us to absorb energy (exogenous shock from events we cannot control), to spring back to our original shape? Often the events are rapid onset or no-notice, we are flung into a chaotic situation without the time to prepare - akin to going to war with the ar