Focus on individual wellbeing doesn’t help
As the powerful feather their own nests, for many daily life is a horror story of precarity and anxiety
At the last moment, I had stuffed K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher into my carry-on case. At 817 pages and weighing in at over a kilo, Fisher almost cost me an excess luggage charge. Better to have packed my local bookshop’s most pilfered title, Fisher’s pocket-sized Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Having landed at Alice Springs, I hired a car and headed west to a motel. Every afternoon, after driving out to explore, I had stationed myself outside my room on a plastic chair, sticky with sweat, sweltering in the heat with Fisher and squadrons of tiny flies.
A year after my trip to the desert, I was under lockdown, my days rotating between reading, walking within a 5km radius and Zooming out to other parts of the world.
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At its worst, the resilience imperative is an offensive, exclusionary narrative that blames individuals for their predicament
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As the vocabularies of personal responsibility and resilience have been embedded into our social thinking, resilience has become a civic duty
The lecture was intended to project a well-meaning exercise in resilience, a word my friend detests. She says resilience is a western notion – that our bias towards a cure leaves out a lot of data. I want to agree. For every example of resilience is an example of its opposite: those who did not survive. So when my friend was asked, politely, to describe what war had taught, she replied, the experience taught me nothing.
When the social world increasingly defines itself in terms of anxiety and uncertainty, and when it is seen as shameful to be dependent on others, the need for resilience also becomes part of our everyday commonsense, one which binds us to its terms and reconciles us to its conditions. This popular truth, as all truths do, has the ability to become a kind of inevitability, reducing our capacity to think or act otherwise. Because they are so widely in circulation, we find ourselves taking up these vocabularies and using them, even as we doubt them or refute them.
Related: ‘Lives being wasted’: how Australia’s mental health system lets young people down