This edition of the Sabbateur is a continuation of my writing last week. While last week’s Sabbateur is not essential to enjoying this one, can I nudge you to read it anyway?
In case my nudging is for naught, last Friday I…
Explored whether Gen Z is indeed, as they say, sensitive but not resilient.
Defined resilience as a skill we learn in the face of trauma and tragedy, anxiety and adversity. It’s not about grit or toughness; it’s about bouncing back. Resilience is about adapting and growing.
Documented that, according to the National Institutes of Health, resilience is learned through training and, important to my writing today, developed through meaningful relationships.
Concluded with this question: IF Gen Z is less resilient and SINCE resilience is learned in communities that foster resilience, what can you and I do to foster resilience in Gen Z?
I got gobs of feedback from last week’s Sabbateur. Love me some reader responses. Please and thank you! In corresponding with readers and exploring resources they shared, this week I have been thinking more acutely about resilience as a critically important trait that is first and foremost fostered by communities.
One dear reader linked me to an episode of the Ezra Klein Show ominously titled, The ‘Quiet Catastrophe’ Brewing in Our Social Lives. It’s an interview with Dr. Sheila Liming, author of the new book Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. It’s a riveting, albeit concerning, conversation about loneliness. Liming says that about 80% of 18-24 year olds feel lonely.
Surprisingly, Gen Z is the loneliest generation. Even college kids living communally, taking classes together, paying big bucks for an entire architecture that forces them together, are lonelier than Boomers!
From 1990 to 2021, there was a 25% decrease in the number of Americans who reported having five or more close friends. Liming explores what it would look like to reconfigure our world to buck this trend and to facilitate social connection.
Liming says we need to grapple with the deeply-rooted structural causal explanations for our loneliness. How deeply rooted? She cites David Brooks arguing in The Atlantic that The Nuclear Family was a Mistake and that “the period when the nuclear family flourished was not normal. It was a freakish historical moment when all of society conspired to obscure its essential fragility.”
On Sunday, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the United States courageously shared his fragility in an op-ed in the NY Times before rolling out his ambitious plan to tackle loneliness. He reflected on his feelings after being fired by Trump:
Even when I was physically with the people I loved, I wasn’t present — I was often checking the news and responding to messages in my inbox. After my job ended, I felt ashamed to reach out to friends I had ignored. I found myself increasingly lonely and isolated, and it felt as if I was the only one who felt that way. Loneliness — like depression, with which it can be associated — can chip away at your self-esteem and erode your sense of who you are. That’s what happened to me.
Then he announced his national framework to rebuild connection and community in America:
Loneliness is more than just a bad feeling. When people are socially disconnected, their risk of anxiety and depression increases. So does their risk of heart disease (29 percent), dementia (50 percent), and stroke (32 percent). The increased risk of premature death associated with social disconnection is comparable to smoking daily — and may be even greater than the risk associated with obesity.
First, we must strengthen social infrastructure — the programs, policies, and structures that aid the development of healthy relationships. That means supporting school-based programs that teach children about building healthy relationships, workplace design that fosters social connection, and community programs that bring people together.
Second, we have to renegotiate our relationship with technology, creating space in our lives without our devices so we can be more present with one another…
Finally, we have to take steps in our personal lives to rebuild our connection to one another — and small steps can make a big difference.
Given these extraordinary costs, rebuilding social connection must be a top public health priority for our nation. It will require reorienting ourselves, our communities, and our institutions to prioritize human connection and healthy relationships. The good news is we know how to do this.
Good news indeed! And good work by Dr. Murthy. The Surgeon General’s Social Connection Agenda is ambitious and empathic and exactly the kind of leadership we need to help Gen Z develop resilience.
Mikhail is doing his part to foster resilience in Gen Z. He read the Sabbateur last week and told me that he worries that his three Gen Z kids don’t make space to process their pain and frustration. Instead of embracing the suck, they are quick to turn to screens to numb their pain. Mikhail wrote:
While we are all guilty of seeking distractions from our pain, resilience is born of fully embracing our pain and reflecting on it. This is how we grow and learn and evolve. It is how we become better, stronger people.
He went on to share an image affixed to the family fridge to remind himself and his kids that they are a family that leans into the pain and reflects and grows together.
I went from coast to coast this week in search of wisdom on resilience.
UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Magazine shares Five Science-Backed Strategies to Build Resilience, all of which require real work. Two of these really resonate with me:
First, change the narrative. Instead of reliving and ruminating over bad times, we should write about it. Just get something down on paper. Expressive Writing as a resilience-building practice. I’m in!
Second, we build resilience by cultivating forgiveness:
You begin by clearly acknowledging what happened, including how it feels and how it’s affecting your life right now. Then, you make a commitment to forgive, which means letting go of resentment and ill will for your own sake; forgiveness doesn’t mean letting the offender off the hook or even reconciling with them. Ultimately, you can try to find a positive opportunity for growth in the experience.
The West is the best. But the Harvard Business Review shared a study that jives with what I have been barking at here.
Resilience is not something we need to find deep down inside ourselves: we can actually become more resilient in the process of connecting with others in our most challenging times…Resilience is found not just in having a network of supporters, but in truly connecting with them when you need them most. It’s in the actual interactions themselves — the conversations that validate your plans, reframe your perspective on a situation, help you laugh and feel authentic with others, or just encourage you to get back up and try again because the battle is a worthy one — that we become resilient.
Then the HBR shared this wicked smaht infographic that might well be the best summative response to the “what is to be done” question I’ve been pondering for the past two weeks.
Of course, forging connections is easier said than done. But the last couple weeks of re-imagining the “Gen Z is sensitive but not resilient” narrative has given me a language I can share with the young people in my life.
Have a lovely weekend y’all. Make connections and stay resilient.
-DL
I’m learning how rituals that mark time matter to me. So this year, I am carving out an hour or so on Friday to sit quietly before my family wakes to write about what I obsessed about that week. If you enjoy this weekly reflection, please subscribe so I can send it to you every Friday.