Hello friends,
A question I keep returning to is one that is very personal to me: How do I know if I am being resilient in a given situation, or if I have simply succumbed to inertia?
The journey of building something on your own is one of patience. Outcomes do not follow actions that linearly, and sometimes you do not even know when they are likely to arrive.
This is very different from the corporate world I inhabited for nineteen years. Work hard or work smart, and in most cases you can see the results within a year or two: promotions, salary increases, bonuses, recognition. If your performance was not up to scratch, you would find out soon enough, if not immediately then at the next appraisal.
When you are out on your own, the feedback takes a long time to come. You rarely know whether staying in the game is strategic or just stubborn. You will only know in hindsight.
Today we will explore the difference between resilience and resignation, and how the internal experience of each can be so vastly different, even when the outward behaviour looks identical.
Enjoy the read!
Siri
The Shawshank Redemption
Andy Dufresne is wrongly convicted of murder and sent to Shawshank State Prison to serve two consecutive life sentences.
The film turns on the contrast between two men. Andy Dufresne and Ellis Boyd "Red" Redding, a contraband smuggler also serving a life sentence.
Andy, despite enduring unimaginable hardships, never accepts the prison as his permanent reality. He accepts it as his current reality and works with what he has. He runs the prison library, does tax returns for the guards, and one afternoon plays opera music over the loudspeaker for the entire prison yard.
Most importantly, he spends nineteen years tunnelling through his cell wall with a small rock hammer, concealing the hole behind a poster of Rita Hayworth. Every night, a little more wall. He never stops.
Red, on the other hand, becomes what the film calls "institutionalised." He adapts so completely to prison life that he loses his capacity to imagine anything beyond it.
There is a poignant scene where an old prisoner called Brooks is released after fifty years and cannot cope with the outside world. He ends up taking his own life.
Red reflects: "These walls are funny. First you hate them, then you get used to them. After long enough, you start to depend on them."
Andy is resilience in action. Red is inertia dressed up as adaptation.
What the difference actually feels like from the inside
From the outside, Andy and Red can look similar for long stretches. Both are in the same prison. Both are getting through the days. Neither is visibly falling apart.
But the internal experience is entirely different.
Andy kept his identity as a prisoner distinct from other identities he inhabited. Red internalised and fully embraced being the prisoner as his main identity.
Andy holds two things at once: a clear-eyed acceptance of his current situation, and an active relationship with his future self. He is not waiting to be rescued. He is not numbing himself to the discomfort. He is in a constant dialogue with the question: what can I do from here?
Red, by contrast, has resolved the discomfort by stopping the dialogue altogether. He no longer asks what he could do. He has made a private peace with the walls.
And that private peace is exactly what makes it so hard to detect in ourselves. It does not announce itself as giving up. It seems like maturity. Like acceptance. Like being realistic.
Our work realities are not permanent
We get so attached to our work identities and our doing that we begin to believe they are who we are. Like Red, we become institutionalised.
A conflict with a manager, a poor performance rating, a piece of difficult feedback, a relegation to an unimportant project: any of these can threaten that identity. And when the threat becomes large enough, we move to protect it.
We resign, we move companies, we decide the workplace is toxic.
We call it a choice. Often, it is inertia in motion.
Resilience looks different.
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It is the capacity to adapt to a current reality while remaining in active relationship with your future self. It means strengthening skills regardless of whether the organisation rewards it.
It means building a financial cushion so that staying or leaving is genuinely a choice rather than a necessity. It means widening your sense of self beyond your job title, so that what happens at work does not have the power to undo you entirely.
It means taking full responsibility for the decision to stay or to leave, rather than waiting for circumstances to make the choice for you.
The question is not whether your situation is hard. The question is whether you are still in dialogue with it.
To Reflect
When you sit with your current work situation honestly, which of these seems closer to true? Are you actively working with your reality, clear-eyed about what you can and cannot change? Or have you made a quiet peace with the walls, and started, without quite noticing, to depend on them?
What would it mean to stay and be fully present to the choice of staying? What would it mean to leave and take full ownership of that too?
If you know someone who is sitting in a difficult work situation and calling it fine, this edition is for them. The people who find this useful are the ones already asking themselves harder questions. You probably know at least one person like that.
Share it with them.
If this landed in your inbox via a friend, you can subscribe to The Refusal of Default on Substack here.
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Siri's Pick
This week's pick is the film that inspired this edition. If you have not watched The Shawshank Redemption, this is your invitation. If you have, it is worth a second watch with fresh eyes.
Bye for now.
Siri 🌱🌀
P.S. If you would like to work with me, drop me an email at siri@sanerworklife.com and let's talk.
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