Sunday morning, February 22nd. A manager reads the exit survey from her third burned-out employee this year. The feedback is familiar: overwhelming workload, unclear priorities, no support from leadership. She nods, makes a note to run a resilience workshop next quarter. The structural problem—her team is understaffed and her leadership is absent—goes unaddressed. The employees leave. The workshop happens. The next hire will need to be resilient.

Resilience is taught as a virtue. It isn't—it's an adaptation, and a second-order one at that. You need resilience when the first-order approach—avoiding bad situations, removing obstacles, changing what's wrong—has failed or isn't available. The modern cult of resilience has convinced people to optimize for their capacity to endure, when the real problem is that too many of them are enduring things they should be escaping or changing. Building your tolerance for harm is not the same as reducing harm. Treating them as equivalent is convenient for whoever benefits from the harm continuing.

What Resilience Actually Is

The psychological definition of resilience is the capacity to adapt successfully in the face of adversity. The key word is adversity—resilience is a response to something bad, not a way to make the bad thing not happen.

This sounds obvious. In practice, the conflation is constant.

When a company tells employees to be more resilient, they're typically asking them to absorb poorly designed workflows, inadequate staffing, and dysfunctional management without quitting. When a school teaches children resilience, they're often teaching them to function despite inadequate resources or social environments that need fixing. When wellness culture celebrates someone for bouncing back from burnout, the structure that burned them out is still running.

The underlying move is always the same: treat the person's capacity to endure as the variable to optimize, rather than the environment creating the endurance requirement.

The Second-Order Problem

Imagine two scenarios.

In the first, a hiker falls into a river. The current is strong but manageable. She panics, swallows water, nearly drowns—but eventually reaches the bank. She survives through effort and luck.

In the second, the same hiker, now trained in river swimming, falls into the same river. She manages the current efficiently, reaches the bank easily. Her resilience has improved.

Both scenarios miss something: she keeps falling in the river.

Resilience training is useful when the river is unavoidable. When it's avoidable—when there's a path that doesn't run past a slippery bank above a fast current—spending your resources on swimming technique is optimizing the wrong variable. The intervention that actually matters is: stop walking there.

In real life, most of the things resilience is invoked to address are avoidable. Bad jobs can be left. Toxic relationships can be ended. Environments that reliably produce burnout can be restructured. The question worth asking before "how can I be more resilient here?" is "why am I still here?"—and more importantly, "who benefits from me staying?"

The Convenient Distribution of Resilience

The people most enthusiastically preaching resilience are rarely the ones who need to develop it.

A company that consistently burns out its employees and responds by running mindfulness workshops has made a choice: it's more convenient to improve employees' capacity to endure than to fix what's burning them out. This is not an accident. Restructuring teams, clarifying priorities, reducing scope, and fixing management costs money and requires admitting the organization is broken. Resilience workshops are cheap and locate the problem in the employees.

The same pattern appears at larger scale. Economic systems that produce chronic stress benefit when the people living in them learn to cope better. Educational systems that consistently fail certain students benefit when those students are taught grit rather than when the failure modes of the systems are examined. The prescription is always directed at the person bearing the cost, not the structure producing it.

This isn't a conspiracy—it's incentive alignment. The people with power to change structures also have the most to lose from acknowledging those structures are broken. The people without that power are offered resilience instead.

The Survivorship Problem

The resilience narrative has a serious data problem: it's primarily told by people who survived.

"Develop resilience and you'll get through it" is statistically contaminated by everyone who didn't get through it. The people who stayed in the bad job for five years and came out with hard-won wisdom look like evidence that endurance produces insight. The people who stayed in the bad job for five years and came out broken aren't telling their stories in motivational contexts.

Angela Duckworth's grit research—which ignited much of the modern resilience industry—has been substantially criticized for exactly this problem. High persistence and passion for long-term goals predicts success in some domains. But the research was largely conducted on high-achieving populations in contexts where the underlying pursuit was reasonable. The selection effects are massive. The person who stuck with something difficult for ten years and succeeded was also in a pursuit worth sticking with. The people who stuck with something miserable for ten years and failed are not evidence in the grit studies.

Endurance in a good direction is different from endurance in a bad one. Resilience doesn't know the difference.

When Resilience Actually Matters

None of this is an argument against resilience. There are genuine cases where it's exactly what's required.

Natural disasters, illness, loss, and trauma are often not things you can escape or restructure your way around. In genuinely uncontrollable circumstances—when the bad thing is happening and cannot be stopped—the capacity to adapt, continue functioning, and eventually recover is invaluable. The research on resilience in these contexts is solid and the benefits are real.

The problem is not with resilience as a capacity. The problem is the universalization of it: treating the endurance of hardship as a virtue regardless of whether the hardship is avoidable. Equating resilience with strength, when sometimes it's just survival with inadequate alternatives.

Resilience matters enormously when you're facing the unavoidable. In avoidable situations, it's a tool that can be used against you.

What To Do Instead

The practical alternative to resilience-first thinking is to ask the prior question first: Is this worth enduring?

Distinguish genuine unavoidability from structural inertia. Most situations we endure are not as locked-in as they feel. The job that seems impossible to leave, the situation that seems impossible to change—scrutinize those assumptions. Social pressure and sunk-cost thinking make controllable situations feel uncontrollable. The test is concrete: what would actually have to change for this to be different, and why hasn't that change happened?

Treat your capacity for endurance as a resource, not a virtue. The fact that you can absorb a bad situation doesn't mean you should. High pain tolerance lets you delay treatment for a treatable illness. High resilience lets you remain in situations that are costing you things that don't come back—time, health, relationships, range of motion in your own life.

Watch for who's recommending resilience. When an organization, relationship, or system recommends that you become more resilient, ask what solving the underlying problem would cost them. The answer is often clarifying. Recommendations to develop resilience that consistently come from people who benefit from your endurance are worth examining carefully.

Apply resilience where it actually belongs. For genuinely unavoidable adversity—grief, illness, failure that can't be undone, random misfortune—resilience is irreplaceable. This is where to develop it and invest in it. Don't dilute that resource by spending it on problems you could instead solve.

The Takeaway

The person who quietly endures years of bad management, absorbs dysfunction without complaint, and calls it strength has not demonstrated admirable resilience. They've demonstrated that they're good at surviving something they probably shouldn't be surviving—and that whoever built the bad system got to keep it running.

Real strength is not indifference to pain. It's the judgment to know when pain is telling you something important: that the thing causing it needs to change.

The answer to most calls to "be more resilient" is not better stress tolerance. It's a harder, more clarifying question: what would have to change for this to not require resilience—and why hasn't that happened yet?

Bounce back from the unavoidable. Remove the avoidable. Knowing which is which is the actual skill.

Today's Sketch

February 22, 2026