Defining resilience, redefining my purpose

LF110 | 'Resilience ' unites human well-being and planetary health, providing a framework for us to "advance, despite adversity".

The gales are blowing

This post is likely a bit more personal than most - consider it a birthday treat 🎁 to myself.

Following the news is likely to result in whiplash, stories popping out left and right about multifaceted challenges. Our world is embroiled in an escalating man-made polycrisis, in which the post -WW2 global stability is turning back into regionalism, nativism, political dysfunction, armed conflict and climate crisis. All seem to build and feed each other like hungry hyrdras.

I have the privilege and freedom to, within reason, decide what I work on, and with whom. Recently my work on aging and longevity has also been exploring the drivers impacting the places where people live and grow old. I’ve always taken a systemic approach to aging and longevity, and now am taking an even broader lens.

Enter resilience

Resilience is a powerful if amorphous concept that unites the missions that I’m working on: human well-being and planetary health.

I’ve never felt that comfortable with the pure ‘longevity’ geeks - the biohackers optimizing every calorie, supplement and gym session, oblivious to the fact that their longevity is determined as much by their neighbour’s as their own. “Don’t die” logically means don’t die of a bullet, or a broken bridge, not just a heart attack.

A gift of the pandemic was the recognition that we share a common humanity. Unfortunately, it didn’t go far enough; we should recognize humanity’s fate is inextricably linked with those of other species on this planet, and the climate and its biodiversity keeps us all stable.

Multiple types

Resilience can apply to health, psychology, economy, cities, networks and any kind of system in general. Angela Duckworth popularised the topic of resilience as ‘grit’, the most important marker of future success. The term is intimately connected to complexity, democracy and decentralization; it turns out that avoiding top-down, bureaucratic, optimized, fragile processes delivers better outcomes for people and planet.

Looking into what resilience means across people, cultures, sectors and systems is going to occupy a good chunk of my time in the months ahead.

Japan: stability; America: rubbery

I was speaking with Ulrike Schaede from UCSD about the topic. Ulrike is a German academic, US-based, and a Japanese business and innovation expert, so she knows about global culture. She feels that resilience in the American context is about bouncing back after a setback. However in the Japanese context, she feels it’s about maintaining stability. I’ll be gathering input from different cultures to explore this further.

It reminded me of a conversation I had with a friend of mine about children. If you prefer stability, not having children may make sense. If you’re comfortable with the volatility, and are willing to pay for the Ups with the Downs, then maybe that nudges you towards kids.

Advancing Despite Adversity

In exploring the definitions, I stumbled upon this from the Driven app - which is all about optimizing your personal resilience. The formulation of ‘advancing despite adversity’ suggets a mission-oriented approach, and not just bouncing back to where you where, but moving forward, towards your goals (maybe even getting stronger because of it i.e. antifragility).

As a summary this is as good as I’ve seen, and I’d love to hear how others think of the term, and where you think we should be focusing attention.