Adrianna Tan
Now reading: Soraya Chemaly’s ‘The Resilience Myth’. I see it as a counter to that weird book about ‘Grit’. She points out that what we view as positive, ‘being resilient’ is centered on an individualist world view and we can do better by focusing on the collective.
Doesn’t go as deep as it can, but a good ‘manifesto’ for people who already believe this.
Adrianna Tan
@sumisu3 I have some thoughts on East Asian cultures’ fetishization of suffering for the family, but that’s a little different from grit for personal productivity and achievement
Jeff Smith
@skinnylatte I’m not a huge fan of the Silicon Valley “grit glorification” but as part Finnish I do have immense respect for “sisu” though I’ve never felt it was used in the way I’ve seen it use in the Silicon Valley culture. Likewise Japanese has a number of words related to resilience and perseverance, including “七転び八起き” and “石の上にも三年”, but my feeling on those are that they are heavily about not letting your family, peers, society down. Yet I do hear them being used as examples of “grit”.
Adrianna Tan
@sumisu3 an example would be, men from those cultures who are like ‘my mother cooks / cleans / works / she is a super woman’ but who have no response to ‘well why don’t you help her?’ Because there are implicit aspects of people having certain amounts of suffering and being ok with that type of role is required in order to be a respected person
Jeff Smith
@skinnylatte I’ve struggled with the whole not wanting to let others down “self punishment”, and cannot completely understand it, having not grown up in that culture. But I’ve heard many folks try to appropriate the Asian phrases and concepts to use as examples of grit and be completely unaware of these implications.
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