We Rewarded Endurance and Called It Resilience
The Endurance Economy
Resilience is one of those words that's absolutely everywhere right now and almost nobody is stopping to question it. It's in the job descriptions, the leadership programs, the school curriculums and the wellbeing strategies, and we've simply accepted it as something we all just need more of. But I want to ask a slightly different question, not how do we build more resilience, but why are we needing quite so much of it in the first place?
The question nobody is asking
We've become very good at asking how to build more resilience in our people, our teams, our leaders; and the question we’ve been far less willing to ask is why? Why are we asking people to be so resilient? What exactly is going on in our workplaces, our lives, that we need people to cope better inside them, and what are we accepting, without ever quite naming it, every time we celebrate someone's ability to endure?
There is a big difference between helping people become stronger and making them accept things that should not be accepted. Right now, I believe we are accepting too much instead of focusing on making people stronger.
How resilience became a performance standard
At some point, resilience changed. It went from being about adapting to being about taking in pressure. The more pressure you can handle without complaining, the more people think you are resilient. The more you keep going without showing any problems, the better your performance rating gets. The person who speaks up about workload gets seen as having low resilience, while the person who keeps their head down and simply endures gets read as the high performer.
"When we're asking people to be resilient to the systems and structures around us, we're not telling them to be resilient. We're telling them to cope better and we're telling them to be able to endure more. And they're not the same thing." — Amy Green
We've turned resilience into a hiring criterion, a KPI and a measure of just how much a person can absorb before they finally break, and in doing all of that we've used it to silence the signal rather than address the source. The person flagging that something is wrong was never the one with low resilience, they might well be the most honest person in the entire room.
The endurance economy we built without noticing
Here's what makes this particular paradox so hard to see: the better our endurance tools become, the less pressure there is on anyone to change the conditions that made the endurance necessary in the first place.
"We haven't just created a resilience problem. We've created an endurance economy in the workplace. We've built an entire economy around helping people endure the stresses." — Amy Green
Resilience training, wellbeing programs, mindfulness apps and stress-management workshops, all of it layered carefully on top of systems and structures that stay entirely unchanged, and then we go and measure the success of those very programs by how well people are coping inside the same conditions that were breaking them to begin with.
"The more effective our endurance tools become, the less pressure there is to change the conditions that make endurance necessary. So the more we're able to cope, the less need there is to look at why we have to cope in the first place." — Amy Green
That was never resilience, it's an endurance economy, and it's exactly why burnout keeps climbing no matter how much training we keep throwing at it.
What resilience was actually supposed to mean
Long before we turned it into a performance standard, resilience meant something quite different from this. It was never meant to be a measure of how much you can take on, or how many plates you can keep spinning, or how long you can keep going before you break, and it was certainly never meant to be a measure of how much you could suffer in silence inside a system that plainly wasn't working.
It meant adaptation rather than endurance, the capacity to move through difficulty and learn from it and come out the other side changed in a way that actually serves you, which is a very different ask indeed from simply absorbing more and more pressure without ever complaining. Until we are ready to take back the original meaning, we will keep creating workplaces that reward the wrong things. These workplaces ignore important signs, confuse tolerance with strength, and mistake endurance for growth.
The conditions are always worth examining, the system is always worth questioning, and the person who dares to say so out loud was never the problem in the room. They might just be the most resilient one in it.
The Wellness Paradox — available now
The Wellness Paradox explores the six paradoxes that keep us trapped in a version of success that was never designed to make us well. It's not a checklist, and it's not another self-care plan. It's an honest look at the systems we've inherited, and an invitation to start living differently.
It's for anyone who is tired of being told to do more.
Book orders → Direct from Author ▪ Amazon.com
About Amy Green
Amy Green is a futurist, keynote speaker, and author of The Wellness Paradox. She is the founder of The Wellness Strategy and has spent years studying the intersection of how we work, how we live, and the systems that shape both. Her work reaches educators, executives, and leaders who are ready to think differently about what success really means.
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