Overthinking About Resilience

Magical Overthinkers

Amanda Montell & Studio71

Education, Science, Society & Culture

4.3 • 636 Ratings

🗓️ 2 October 2024

⏱️ 58 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At the opening assembly of host Amanda Montell's Baltimore public arts high school, whose student body featured a wide range of socioeconomic and racial backgrounds, the vice principal gave an address that encouraged everyone listening to "have grit." No matter what you're going through at school or at home, in the face of adversity, keep your nose down and your chin up. Be resilient. This always stuck out as a complicated piece of one-size-fits-all advice. In our ever-complicating society, as we increasingly center critiques of systemic injustice and legitimize mental health discourse, how is our relationship to "resilience" changing? Journalist Soraya Chemaly (@sorayachemaly), author of The Resilience Myth, joins Amanda (@amanda_montell) to help us better understand the concepts of grit, optimism, and the not-infrequent desire to just give up all "resilience" and break down. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at https://betterhelp.com/MAGICAL and get on your way to being your best self. - Join the "Magical Overthinkers Club" by following the pod on Instagram @magicaloverthinkers. - To access early, ad-free episodes and more, subscribe to the Magical Overthinkers Substack. - Pick up a hard copy of Amanda's book The Age of Magical Overthinking: Notes on Modern Irrationality, or listen to the audiobook. To watch the podcast on YouTube: https://bit.ly/MagicalOverthinkersYouTube ; Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast for free wherever you're listening If you like the show, telling a friend about it would be amazing! You can text, DM, email, or send this link to a friend: https://bit.ly/MagicalOverthinkers Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the magical overthinkers podcast, a show for thought spirallers, exploring the
0:11.1	subjects we can't stop overthinking about, from monogamy to narcissism. If you can connect to the idea
0:18.3	that despite living in the information age, life only seems to be making less sense,
0:24.2	if you can't help but feel like for some mysterious reason, it just feels especially impossible to exist as a human in the world right now,
0:32.8	then you're in the right place. This podcast is here to soften the clash between our innate human
0:39.3	mysticisms and the overwhelm of this time to help quiet the cacophony in our minds for a little
0:47.2	or even hear a melody in it. I'm your host, Amanda Montel. Today we're overthinking about
0:54.1	resilience.
1:00.0	I will never forget the first time I was on the recipient end of a resilience lecture. It was the first day of ninth grade. I was just starting in a new high school. And the vice principal
1:11.5	came to the new ninth grade student body to give an assembly. And the main thing I remember her
1:17.4	expressing during her speech was this notion that we as students needed to have grit. If we
1:23.5	wanted to succeed in school, then make friends and hopefully get into an amazing college.
1:29.2	No matter what challenges were thrown our way, we needed to buckle down and be resilient.
1:35.3	And as much as I saw the value and the general wisdom that when life gets you down or presents adversity,
1:44.0	you should maintain hope or take steps necessary
1:47.0	not to let it totally bring you to your knees forever. I also found that as a piece of one-size
1:54.2	fits all inspiration, be resilient left something to be desired. I came to learn that that resilience mantra was not
2:03.8	exclusive to my ninth grade first day of school assembly. In the early to mid-2000s, it was everywhere.
2:10.5	And later in this episode, when I chat with my very special guest, feminist writer and
2:15.1	activist Saraya Shemali, author of the new book The Resilience
2:18.2	Myth. We're going to unpack the cultural context that backdrops resilience messaging.
2:23.9	But now that I'm an adult and using social media, I have been seeing a lot of criticism of
	...

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