Why Resilience Isn’t Enough: Beyond Survival and the Need for Real Change | Op-Ed
By: Jamila Gomez
“She remained strong through it all.” It’s the kind of line we’ve all seen—splashed across headlines after disasters, tucked into profiles of grieving families, repeated in stories of women carrying impossible loads. The word “resilient” is always meant as praise. But when you hear it often enough, it begins to sound less like admiration and more like an evasion.
Resilience is the ability to bend without breaking, to endure hardship and still move forward. That is undeniably a powerful human quality. But the way our media frames resilience often does more to soothe the public than to confront reality. Survival is elevated as if it were the whole story, while the conditions that required such resilience are left unexamined.
The patterns are easy to spot. After a hurricane, neighbors rebuilding their homes with bare hands are celebrated, but little attention is given to why infrastructure failed or why government aid was delayed. In the aftermath of shootings, survivors are praised for their courage, but coverage often avoids asking why the violence keeps recurring. And when a Black woman shoulders caregiving, community leadership, and full-time work, she is hailed as strong, while the lack of structural support that forced her into that role goes unquestioned. In each case, admiration of resilience replaces accountability.
Resilience stories are seductive because they give audiences permission to look away. They transform painful realities into inspirational content. It’s easier to marvel at how someone endured than to demand changes that might prevent the suffering altogether. “Look, she survived” is a much tidier ending than “she should never have been put through this.”
But resilience comes at a cost. Bending without breaking still leaves scars. Constant endurance drains bodies, frays relationships, and erodes trust in institutions. When media outlets elevate resilience as the ultimate virtue, they normalize struggle as something to be admired rather than addressed. The unspoken message is that we should expect to suffer and expect to keep going—no matter the toll.
What if the media told a different story? Imagine if, alongside honoring strength, headlines interrogated the failures that made strength necessary. Instead of “She rose from the ashes,” imagine “She should never have been left in the fire.” Instead of celebrating communities for bouncing back, imagine celebrating the policies, infrastructure, and care that kept them from being knocked down in the first place.
Resilience deserves respect, but it should never be the end of the story. Real progress begins when we move beyond marveling at survival and start dismantling the conditions that make survival the only option. Until then, resilience will remain both inspiring and tragic: a testament to human willpower, and a reminder of how much we still refuse to change.
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