Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff

The word ‘resilience’ is getting thrown around quite a bit these days – it’s being applied to everything from the economy to the healthcare system, from the tourist industry to the housing market.

Resilience is also being increasingly used when speaking about our kids and young adults. Even before the pandemic, there was chatter about whether we, as a society, were building enough resilience into the next generations.

I’m sure many people would be ready to answer this question with a resounding NO, in capital letters. NO, we are not doing, nor have done, a great job at making sure the younger members of our society are resilient. 

I think our tendency to blame Millennials or GenZedders for their perceived flakiness or general dissatisfaction, however, is ill-placed. If they are indeed flakey, then the fault, in my opinion, rests solely on our shoulders. 

The immediate generations above this cohort have never had their own resilience truly tested and therefore have an overblown opinion of how resilient they truly are – we think we’re strong and hold the young’uns to our standards, but the truth is most of us only know true resilience in theory.

As a member of Generation X, I, along with the Boomer generation before mine, had the benefit of growing up in a society that was free of those hardships, which have the ability to put things into perspective. War, hunger, poverty, sickness, high rates of death – these brutal life lessons often serve to make us grateful for the peace, food, comfort and health we enjoy, for the things that our parents were content with.

But with these benefits a given for the last sixty odd years, what have we had to provide the counterbalance? The things we take for granted do not suffice in delivering us joy and contentment, and so we are left searching and wanting more, and feeling increasingly disgruntled by the most mundane things. 

In this manner we have also raised the younger generations. The more they were given, the more they wanted; the more we fought their battles, the easier we made their lives; the more they relied on us, the softer they became. Until finally, in the absence of a real crisis, not receiving everything they desire when they desire it has become the disaster on which they place all of their angst.

And what do we do? We continue to appease them, just as we appease ourselves when we are not happy. Because we can, we buy those shoes, that bag, that phone, that car, we go on that holiday, to that café or restaurant – whatever our vices, we pander to them, as we pander to the sense of entitlement of the young.

The pandemic could have been the opportunity for a reset, the crisis needed to provide perspective about what really matters in life. And, in some ways, it was. Locked in our homes without genuine connectedness, we longed for the simplest pleasures – the chance to hug our friends and family and enjoy a day in the sunny outdoors, to say hellos and goodbyes through physical togetherness. 

But the pandemic also made us ever more dependent on material things to fill the emotional void. The immediate availability of those items, delivered straight to our door, offered a quick fix or a momentary diversion from reality - or a sure way to shut the kids up. Our collective sense of individual entitlement grew.

It seems to me that we no longer have the patience and graciousness to take things as they come. We arc up at the slightest injustice, send an email if our kid doesn’t make the sports team, lose our minds if we have to queue at the post office for twenty minutes, or fall to pieces simply because it’s raining – again. This is behaviour we pass on or even justify it in our kids, “oh, they’re young they don’t understand.”

When my generation was growing up, the starving children in Ethopia were the counterpoint used in an effort to make us grateful for what we were given. Today, we might point to the millions of displaced Ukrainians who have lost their homes, their families, their livelihoods, as the benchmark against which we should measure how lucky we are.

For me, resilience is taking strength from what we do have left when we think we have nothing, it’s being able to look for and find joy after a heartache, it’s looking at the bigger picture and realising that the small stuff is not worth the energy we spend agonising over it. We’ve seen the evidence of this all around us over the last few years, it was there after bushfires and floods and lockdowns and death.

We should take inspiration from this and be sure to pass it on to our young, because, frankly, right now, we have bigger battles to fight. And that’s really going to take a lot of resilience.