Resilience Isn’t Always a Good Thing |
Israel’s “word of the decade” is Resilience (in Hebrew: khosen). It certainly has been necessary and well displayed through Covid, the Judicial Reform/Revolution brouhaha, a couple of serious war campaigns – the challenges kept coming, and Israelis have held up quite well through it all. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like we’re finished, given the non-total-victory on the Iran War coupled with ongoing bombardment from Hezbollah in the north (notwithstanding last night’s 10-day cease fire).
Which brings up an interesting question: is there such a thing as too much resilience? In other words, could resilience be counter-productive under certain conditions? The answer, perhaps not so surprisingly, is: yes!
Two decades ago, several serious social scientists studied a trait called “grit” that they defined as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” A decade later a few other researchers asked whether “grittier individuals might incur some costs by persisting when they could move on” (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2015.08.004). Their conclusion was that indeed “grit” could be bad if taken to an extreme. How so? People with high levels of grit were more likely to continue working at undertakings or projects that objectively and clearly were unattainable. Put more colloquially and metaphorically, instead of........