Resilience, Class and The Crucible of Life

Life is shit and then you die

Apologies for the morbid subheading. Both of my parents where fans of this phrase, I’m unsure whether the idiom still passes their lips, but they certainly embodied it when they were younger. You could always rely on my mum and dad to regard the concept of an easy life with a scowl on their face. Even though it was said with a touch of playfulness, it was still dispiriting to hear as a child, because I knew there was something inescapable about it, something inevitable. It felt like a deeply human truth. Life is hard.

I grew up in an ever changing and often chaotic environment. There was a ton of neglect, a fair bit of violence and healthy serving of emotional abuse. My mother is a heroin addict with bi-polar and my father was a frightening man with poor impulse control. I rarely attended primary school and I was only partially socialized. My house burnt down when I was seven, so for roughly 3 years I moved from couch to couch with a mother who was less than motherly. As you can imagine, I was a dysfunction child. Angry and withdrawn, apathetic and miserable. Luckily, things got better, I have since grown but have retained some battle scars. I have many problems, but I have as many virtues. Through trial and error, triumph and failure, my identity has been formed and my strengths have been earned. The virtue that I believe is fundamental to the human experience, is resilience, but it must be won through suffering.

I have come to understand that life is careless, the world isn’t for me, fortune is cold and objective. I’ve learned to wrestle what I need from life, that includes brief but transformative moments of happiness.

Once you’ve been knocked on your ass several times and scrambled your way back up with raised fists, life bestows upon you a begrudging respect. You are imbued with thick skin and the irreverence to mock the world in all of its seriousness. It’s a scary trade off, it requires hard lessons and a fair bit of suffering, but it’s a trade off most people who have dealt with the inexorable indignities of life will happily take. The audacity to laugh in the face of misfortune despite the knowledge that it will come for you, is an invaluable tool. I don’t lament my childhood, it’s what me and everybody else who grew up in tumultuous times called living. We generally accepted that life was tough and you had to be grateful when it let up. Not having the resources to curate our environment and shield ourselves from risk, we took what we could get and adapted to our conditions. Our norms and values, our language, were products of our environment. We were irreverent, defiant, suspicious, shrewd and intuitive. When I was young, I always thought that was what it meant to be working class. I didn’t understand the economics of it all, but I felt it in my bones.

This is perhaps part of the reason why the majority of Britons identify as working class despite a significant amount of them holding down professional and managerial positions. There has been a number of studies that show that class distinctions in Britain are largely a result of a individuals norms and values rather than their salary. I to have a complicated interpretation of “my class”. Fortunes change, as do lifestyles, identity evolves. But we respond to incentives, and it would seem that more people want to exploit the new cashet that being working class has been given by the modern obsession with privilege. The benefits of this appropriation are various. The label of working class gives an individual a sense of grittiness and resilience. It grounds their world view in reality, whilst simultaneously making them immune to the pejorative of “privileged”. It’s a great smokescreen for elites who sneer at the working class whilst coopting a populist narrative.

I think nowadays you can say you are, or have a “thing” without verification. This seems to me another symptom of a sheltered life. You can assign your own virtues freely without having them ascribed to you by the people who know you most. To a certain extent, this is harmless, but we should be careful not to eradicate the need prove ourselves. “I’m a really compassionate and tolerant person. I stand for the oppressed. I’m really objective. I’ve got the facts. I love minorities.” The way I grew up, you had to earn your virtues. People inferred your qualities, not by what you said, but by how you acted, what you did. Some insolent snob at a party telling everyone how astute or compassionate he is was met with suspicion. I used to think there was no substitute for experience, it was the consequence of living a rich and complicated life, but now it seems experience is an entirely selective process, and your personality is simply a series of statements you make about yourself. We expect life to be filtered and sterilised so that we may project onto it the abstraction of a perfect self. You can simply say what you are and expect the world to react with subservience.

When you face life head on, with all its inequalities and obstacles, you earn your stripes. Your virtues are contextualized by formative experience. I learnt mercy and tolerance by seeing my mother, who could be outright villainous, crippled by her vices mentally and physically. Though she is culpable, she is also human, and seeing another human being, your mother, the woman who brought you into this world, crying on the bathroom floor covered in vomit, should invoke in you a terrible concoction of feelings. She needed help, so we rallied around her, even though she hurt us terribly. Unfortunately, we did not have the patience for her continued relapses, and not only that, her shame demanded isolation, and so she alienated all of her children. To invoke the systems of popular role playing games, if you want to add more skill points to your characters tolerance, engage in people who have terrible flaws, learn their story and realise their humanity. If you choose to disregard someone because of their opinions or language, you are not tolerant, likely because you have yet to experience the stunning and terrible breadth of human behaviour.

You should be able to identity the formative experiences that nurtured in you your most valued attributes. My conviction, my empathy, came to me in my weakest moments. The anger and despondency I inherited from my parents threatened to ruin me. I was quickly becoming a danger unto myself and others, the kind of teenager who might plan some terrible act upon his neighbourhood or school. As horrible as the thought may be, I’m glad I do not live in a country where guns are accessible. Having experienced that hopelessness and alienation, I have a deep empathy for the young adults whom I work with (I work in a community college in London where we deal with plenty of serious behavioral issues). Conviction came when I resolved myself not to become a statistic of my childhood, I would do what it took to correct for my circumstances. This necessitated an uncomfortable and rigorous exploration inward. A dissection of my treacherous mind. I have broken down my psyche into a thousand pieces, and felt the edge of every piece, and it’s made living with myself less painful. The cavalry was not coming, only I could change my fortune and to do so I would need to change myself, though I will say, the love of a good woman has done more for me than I ever imagined.

Of course the lingering effects of childhood still plagues my mental health, but adverse affects on ones mental health from one event or another is unavoidable. It seems to me, that one of the ways you build a strong character, is by exposing yourself to the harsh climate of life, and adapting to the conditions so that you may develop the strength to persevere through the existential dread of consciousness. Basically, you need resilience, and money or privilege in whatever form it manifests will only shelter you for so long. It doesn’t matter whether it’s in childhood or later in life, you will be tested, and the results will reveal what you’re made of. Your weaknesses, strengths and beliefs are shaped by life’s withering heat. I am not suggesting people be forced into difficult, socially complicated scenarios that test each of their self ascribed virtues, but I do ask that people have the humility to pose to themselves thought experiments that explore how they might react when the stakes are high.

Life is a rich curriculum of experiences that deal with the human condition. The lessons are hard but worth learning. They’ll help you understand the uncomfortable truths that hide in the dark corners of society. Being as close as I have to the unraveling of a person’s mind (and experienced a partial unravelling myself), I know what we are capable off. I know how low we will stoop and how high we can climb. I have seen the most groveling and pathetic of creatures beg for forgiveness. I have seen murderous rage, unrestrained hedonisms and unimaginable redemption. I can feel pity, even love for a woman who has neglected feeding her children because she needed money for crack. People don’t scare me so much. The bar for me to be appalled by bad behaviour is set high, and yet my criteria for what makes a decent human being is forgiving. Alas, this seems less so the case with large swathes of the public, especially young digital natives who assume that life owes them safety, and that human behaviour should be carefully curated. We’re raising our children to live like open wounds, liable to be harmed by anything with an edge and susceptible to deterioration if exposed to the nitty gritty of life. Those children will grow up to be fragile adults who demand the world be rid of all danger lest they be harmed by the things in life that threaten their “safety”, including harmless people with heterodox or subversive opinions. No wonder so many who populate the elite are desperate to overlook the working class. There is nothing more terrifying for the sheltered and privileged than a class of people who represent the strength that comes from confronting the harsh realities of life. Rob Henderson’s essay on luxury beliefs struck me as pertinent. The basic argument being that some beliefs and opinions “confer status on the upper classes, whilst inflicting costs on the lower classes.” I’m unsure how foolproof this theory is. I imagine there’s a lot of complicated intersecting phenomena regarding the origin of various beliefs. That being said, the idea of life without adversity or accountability is a good example of a luxury belief which could potentially erode the resilience held by those who lack the resources to protect themselves from the ordeal of life.

I have worked in a community college for ten years and I have seen the culture change. When I started working as a career coach, parents would come in with downtrodden children who had received poor GCSE grades. The child’s gaze would be stuck to the floor, their body bowed by shame, and their parents eyes would bore into the back of their head.

The kid would murmur a half hearted excuse in reply, but they knew. They knew that the onus was on them, even if they had a vague sense that the quality of the teachers, or their friends, or their changing bodies contributed to their lack of focus. It was seen as a given that the path of least resistance, which is to blame those aforementioned forces, was a poor and lazy impulse. The kid would apologise, we would discuss what could change, how we could help, what the future held. Parents had sympathy for the teachers, for the support staff, for the administrators. In short, they had sympathy for the system as well as their children. Now it seems that parents have unanimously decided that their child’s poor behaviour or achievement is a direct result of the schools inability accommodate them.

“Your son keeps punching the disabled students”

“It’s because he’s not being supported properly. He’s got ADHD. His teacher hasn’t been in. The food in the canteen isn’t his favourite. The disabled students are weird,”

“Your daughter is failing maths and English.”

“You haven’t given her enough time to do her homework. She’s got dyslexia. Maths is boring. The teachers discriminate against her.”

I’m being trite but you get my point. I have the utmost sympathy for the kids who struggle in school, I see myself in them. It’s one of the reasons I’ve worked in education for over ten years, but you simply cannot avoid hard work, and hard work sometimes means taking accountability even if it’s not fair. I did not deserve the things that happened to me when I was young, but I had to make do. The state could not reach into my home and rid my parents of their addictions or teach them to control their violent impulses. No activist could save me. I was the victim of terrible circumstance, but the fundamental agent of change was always going to be me, and that’s the way I like it. I learned that I am stronger than life’s inequalities. The vast majority of us have that same strength. This is not to say that we shouldn’t amend our systems, that education isn’t flawed and in need of significant changes, or that people, within reason, should be protected from the worst vicissitudes of life. But there’s something to be said for being in the frying pan and facing the fire. Modernity and its conveniences has allowed many of us to be sheltered from the hardships that we used to assume were baked into the cake. It’s reductive to say that working class people are resilient and everybody else is fragile, there are certainly some from low income backgrounds who surrender themselves to listlessness and cynicism. I do wish, however, that the virtues found in the averages of class populations could be honestly appropriated and internalized across class lines, not exploited for political clout. There’s a lot we could learn from each other. I’ve mentioned this before in old pieces, but integration is a personal responsibility. We need not only learn, but admire the qualities of the people who have less, and vice versa. I have a sneaking suspicion that the anxiety epidemic of modernity is partially due to a lack of suffering through big problems and emerging battered but triumphant. I am hoping that we do not abandon our resilience in favour of elite fragility.

It is by no means an entirely bad thing that some are able to avoid the crucible of life, as I said, it’s a trade off. We exchange suffering and resilience for frailty and comfort. It is only by avoiding the hard truths of life that people could possibly be naïve enough to employ the ludicrous term “my truth”. It is a phrase I heard only recently, and it troubled me. Truth is not for anybody, it does not care for you or me, it exists without us. Truth is, more often than not, inconvenient. Life is shit and then you die is morbid and flippant, but life cares not for your safety, and asking for it is nothing short of arrogance. Life can be shit, and you will certainly die, but you might have some fun along the way, and developing some resilience will help you whether the storm without bitterness or blame as your shelter.