Psychology Today59%
The Problem With Pushing Resilience 76%
By Jeanine Connor MBACP96% MSc96% MEd96% BSc (Hons)96%
7/21/2026, 10:35:02 AM
BS Summary: This article contains 34 faulty reasoning types, including Pessimism Bias, Negativity Bias, and False Dilemma, with Hasty Generalization as the most egregious example at 28.8% saturation with 187 hits. Analysis detected 1,491 faulty-reasoning hits from 650 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 59.4% and a BS Rank of 76% (7,437 of 30,584 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 75.70% of the article peer group.
I have a problem with resilience.
Or rather, a problem with the [mostly] Gen X notion that Gen Z need more of it.
Being an adolescent or young adult is tough, and tougher now than it was for Generation X when we were experiencing our own adolescence and young adulthood.
Modern life is furnished with social and political inequity, extreme weather events, widespread poverty, pandemics, racism, homophobia and transphobia, violence against women and girls, exploitative porn, misogynistic media, non-consensual image-sharing, cyberbullying and war.
This state of so-called “permacrisis” affects us all, to a greater or lesser extent, but it impacts Gen Z more than older adults because these events have been prevalent for a greater portion of their lives than they have been for ours.1
Another thing that makes modern life hard for Gen Z is the amount of choice on offer.
They are sold the myth that this is a good thing, but that’s not true.
Making choices is hard, because it results in change, which is tough in and of itself.
Making a choice also means giving something up, which leads many to experience short-term fear of missing out (FOMO) and sometimes long-term regret.
The more choices we have, the more we must turn down, and the more likely we are to experience overwhelm, FOMO and regret.
This was demonstrated in a well-known psychological study using jam.2 Psychologists set up a tasting booth in a supermarket that displayed either six flavours of jam or 24.
When shoppers visiting the tasting booth were offered a choice of six jams, almost 30% bought a jar.
Of those offered 24 varieties, only 3% made a purchase, suggesting that too much choice hampered their motivation to buy.
In short, too much choice leaves people feeling stuck and unmotivated.
Thanks to the internet, Gen Z are exposed to infinite options in all areas of life: what to wear, what to watch, what to eat, who to date and what to do with their lives.
Many are experiencing a kind of decision fatigue which feels debilitating to the extent that even the simplest of choices are beyond reach and leave them feeling stuck.
To add insult to injury, while experiencing debilitating stuck-ness within the context of permacrisis, Gen Z is told that these are "the best years of their lives”.
Some of them play into this fallacy, by broadcasting their painstakingly curated lives in filtered squares online, accompanied by the hashtag #livingmybestlife.
The truth—in real life (IRL)—is that many are living their worst life, just like all other Gen Z-ers pretending they’re not.
Having the “these are the best years of your life” myth debunked should come as a relief; imagine how miserable it would be if our best lives were already behind us by the time we reached 30?
Being young is hard, for all the reasons I’ve mentioned, not to mention the hotbed of hormones making everything seem like a matter of life and death.
And sometimes it literally is a matter of life and death: Remember COVID-19?
The accumulated stuff of modern life can feel overwhelming and is often what brings Gen Z to therapy, often at a point of personal crisis and sometimes as a last resort after they’ve already tried to be more resilient.
Surviving modern life is not about getting the delicate “snowflake” generation to toughen up.
Resilience is not something that can or should be indoctrinated into them so that they can withstand whatever sh*t life throws at them.
Surely it would be better to do something to stop the sh*t landing than to try to change the generation on whom it lands heaviest?
Which is why I engage troubled, confused, overwhelmed and stuck young people in therapeutic relationships, and think with them about their lived realities, rather than tell them to put up and shut up, and just be more resilient.
Speakers
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Analysis
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