What we now call resilience, my parents just called Thursday
My father broke his hand in 1972, working a job he didn't love, in a town he didn't particularly want to be in. He was twenty-three. He went to A&E, got it set, was told not to use it for six weeks, and went back to work the next morning, because not going back to work was not, in any practical sense, an available option.
He has told this story exactly twice in my hearing. Both times, he told it the way you'd tell a story about a flat tire. With a small shrug. With no editorial. With the absolute absence of any sense that what he'd done was admirable, or remarkable, or worth dwelling on.
Years later, in my early thirties, I sprained my wrist falling off a bicycle in London. I worked from home for a week. My friends sent me sympathetic messages. My partner at the time made me soup. I posted, mildly, about it on a group chat. I was, broadly, considered to be having a hard time.
I don't tell these two stories side by side to make myself sound soft. I tell them because I think they show something real about a generational difference that, in self-help circles, gets framed entirely wrong.
We talk about resilience now as if it's a quality. A virtue. A skill you can cultivate by reading the right books or listening to the right podcasts. We give it courses and workshops and four-week programs. We treat it like a muscle you go to the gym to develop.
For my parents and their generation, resilience wasn't any of that. It wasn't a quality. It wasn't a virtue. It barely had a name. It was just what was left after every other option had been ruled out.
What the world actually offered them
I want to think honestly about what was and wasn't on the menu for my parents in the 1960s and 70s, because I think the modern version of this conversation tends to romanticize their toughness without being clear-eyed about what produced it.
My parents grew up in a world with very few off-ramps.
There was no therapist on speed dial, because therapy was, for working-class people in their part of the country, something other people did. There was no mental health day at work, because that wasn't a phrase that existed yet.
There was no quitting the job because the job was bad for your wellbeing, because the alternative to the job was no money. There was no leaving the marriage at the first sign of trouble, partly because of social pressure, partly because of religious pressure, and partly because there was, structurally, nowhere to go and no money to get there with.
My mother once told me, when I was complaining about a job I wanted to leave, that she'd worked for nine years at a place she'd hated, because the bus from her flat went directly to the office and she couldn't afford a job that required two changes. That was the calculation. Not "is this aligned with my values." Not "is this serving my growth." Could she get there. Could she pay rent.
What this produced, in her and in millions of people her age, was not exactly resilience in the inspirational sense. It was something more like the absence of alternatives, lived in for so long that it eventually started to look like character.
The character was real. I don't want to dismiss it. My parents handle adversity in ways that, frankly, I'm not sure my generation could replicate. But the character was forged in conditions where there was no other option. They weren't choosing toughness over softness. They were doing what was in front of them because there wasn't anything else in front of them.
The generational misunderstanding
This is where I think a lot of the current cultural conversation gets stuck.
You'll hear, often from people my parents' age or older, a kind of weary contempt for younger generations. Kids these days can't handle anything. Everyone's so soft now. Everyone's in therapy. Everyone needs a mental health day. Back in my time, we just got on with it.
The first half of that observation is sometimes accurate. Younger generations do, on average, reach for help and language and accommodation in ways that previous generations didn't. The second half of that observation—the "we just got on with it"—is where the misunderstanding lives.
They didn't just get on with it. They got on with it because there was nothing else to do. The "just" implies a choice, a noble selection of stoicism over self-indulgence. There was no choice. The stoicism wasn't a virtue they cultivated. It was the default state of a life with no exits.
And the cost of all that getting on with it was real, even if it didn't get talked about. I look at the men of my father's generation and I see, in many of them, a particular kind of weather. A flatness. A reservoir of unprocessed difficulty that nobody ever asked them to put down. They got on with it, and the cost was that they got on with it for forty years carrying things that, if anyone had given them permission to set down, they'd have been better off without.
My father is, as men of his generation go, on the more communicative end of the spectrum. He still has, as far as I can tell, an entire decade of his early adult life that he's never really talked about, to anyone, because the framework for talking about it didn't exist where and when he was raised. The events of that decade are, by all accounts I've been able to piece together, significant. They live somewhere in him. He has gotten on with it for fifty years.
I don't think that's a triumph of resilience. I think it's a man doing the only thing he was equipped to do.
What the new generation actually inherited
Here's where I want to be careful, because the easy take is that we have it better now and we're squandering it. I don't think that's quite right either.
What my generation inherited isn't a world without difficulty. The difficulties are different and in some ways harder to locate. Job markets are unstable in ways my parents never experienced. Cities are unaffordable. Long-term relationships happen later or not at all. The structures that gave my parents' generation a kind of grim certainty—you'd work at the same place for thirty years, you'd buy the same kind of house your parents bought, you'd raise your kids the way you were raised—are mostly gone.
What we got, instead, was options. Lots and lots of options. And language. And help. And the cultural permission, mostly, to admit when something is hard.
The trade-off is real. We are, on average, less able to white-knuckle our way through a sustained period of difficulty than my parents were. Some of that is because we've forgotten how. Some of that is because the difficulties don't reward white-knuckling the way theirs did. You can't grit your teeth through twenty years of an unstable gig economy the way my mother gritted her teeth through nine years of the bus to the office. The shape of the problem has changed.
What's interesting is that the older generation's resilience and the younger generation's vocabulary are, often, not enemies. They're the same impulse expressed under different conditions. My parents got through hard times by enduring. We get through hard times by naming. Neither approach is morally superior. Both are responses to what's actually available in the surrounding environment.
What I've taken from watching my parents
I'm not going to tell you I've replicated my parents' resilience, because I haven't, and I'm not sure I could.
What I have taken from them, watching them carefully over forty years, is a couple of more specific things.
The first is a deep skepticism about the idea that any feeling, however intense, requires immediate action. My parents, by sheer habit, taught me that you can be miserable in a job, in a season, in a stretch of life, and the misery does not necessarily mean anything urgent has to be done.
Sometimes the misery is just weather. Sometimes you wait. Sometimes the thing that felt unbearable in February turns out, by August, to have been a phase. My generation, in my experience, often acts on emotions before the emotions have finished cooking. My parents didn't have that luxury. The slow-cooking, in retrospect, often produced better decisions.
The second thing I've taken is a quieter relationship with complaint. I'm not anti-complaint—I think articulating what's hard is one of the better things humans can do for each other—but I've watched my parents not complain about a great many genuinely hard things, and I notice that the not-complaining hasn't, in their case, made the things harder.
If anything, it's made them lighter. There's an energy that goes into the maintenance of a complaint. My parents didn't have that energy to spare. Withholding it turned out to be, accidentally, a kind of self-care.
The third thing, and this is the one I think about most, is the simple fact that they did it. They built a life, raised children, stayed together, in conditions that did not coddle them and did not give them the language we now consider essential for processing those conditions. The life isn't perfect. It carries the weather of its own production. But it's a life. It's still going. Both of them are still here, in the same house, doing the same things they've done for fifty years.
I think about that on the days when I'm reaching for a particular kind of self-help vocabulary to explain why something is hard. The vocabulary is useful. I don't want to give it up. But there's a quieter thing underneath the vocabulary that my parents have without the words for, and I'd like, in the second half of my life, to have a little more of it.
Not because their way was right and ours is wrong. Because their way had something in it that we, in our better-equipped, better-named, better-supported lives, can occasionally forget to notice.
It was just, for them, what was in front of them.
It might be worth remembering, sometimes, that what's in front of us is mostly fine.
