Who Gets to Play the Victim, and How?

On the resilience drought and how we can fix it.

Recently, an article was going around on resiliency that I really wanted to talk about — because it’s making me think deeply about lack of resilience and how we talk about victimhood and hardship.

the gen z resilience drought

“Too much resilience — too much hopping — is truly harmful. You don’t want to break your good leg. However, giving yourself too much grace is self abandonment. Only you can truly know what this balance is for yourself, so explore it.”

This piece argues very stringently — and astutely — that gen-Z often picks ‘comfort over connection’, either in accepting an unhappy life situation without feeling the motivation or need to change it, or in taking mild discomforts as life-defining when they are not.

“Listening to someone talk about their problems even though you also have problems is not suffering. That is the mild discomfort that simply comes with being a friend. That is not a time to set a boundary (unless it happens constantly, duh). Picking someone up from the airport even though you have to wake up at 5am instead of 8am and have plans that weekend is mild discomfort. Your communal work place having bright lights that make you uneasy due to mild sensory issues is, I fear, mild discomfort. The thing about mild discomfort is not that you can never address it, it’s that you are not entitled to be without it in all situations. Especially communal ones.”

This is so unbelievably true. All of the worst friends I’ve ever had are the ones who genuinely believe their life is worse than yours, and it entitles them to treat you in whichever way they want; who model their relationships with you off a victim/victimizer paradigm in circumstances that do not require one. (And has anyone else noticed how frequently those people are absolutely the one victimizing others?)

But then, my quibble: I have some complicated thoughts about the piece specifically on chronic illness as something one reacts to by self-victimization. The thing is, in my experience becoming chronically ill is a huge loss, and I think that taking time to mourn that is… perhaps healthy. I don’t say that to promote self-victimization, because I don’t think that mourning your own changed condition necessitates self-victimization. I just think it’s a natural (and also, non-generational one) human reaction to a poor situation. OP mentions that they lost all their friends at 17 because they ‘demanded pity’ and while of course their situation isn’t made entirely clear, that felt to me very self-critical; self-flagellation seems like a normal reaction to have to something so painful as a 17-year-old.

But I realized while reading this piece that this feeling of defensiveness — desire for some of those who I feel are victimized to be taken seriously — exists in parallel with a feeling that many who insist on perpetual victimhood are betraying the trust I’d like to give to everyone. Which is something the piece gets at extremely astutely:

“But the assumptions that a) those that don’t wear their hardship or otherness on their sleeve don’t also experience discomfort, and b) to live in total comfort at all times is a human right are problematic… What I find the most frustrating is when people see someone move from A to B and B to C and assume that they must have two healthy legs, for why are they in motion? As someone who has been limping along for a while now, I never assume this, yet people assume it of me. This is the result of the resilience drought. Those that expect comfort cannot fathom those that continue in discomfort.”

I deeply resonated with this section. It is beyond frustrating to see people self-victimize on their own conditions — particularly adhd, which I also have, although to be fair I have a very non-inconvenient case — as defense. But it also doesn’t escape my notice that part of that feeling comes from my own feeling that I have also been victimized, and I’m still going, so why aren’t you? It has never escaped my notice that much critique of ‘the victim mindset’ comes from those of us who feel we would be entitled to have a victim mindset, if anyone were.

Back to ‘I have ADHD’. I’m not sure I would call these excuses, because I think that sometimes contains an unfair implication that it’s being used to defend the self to others. I don’t think most people who are self-victimizing are really trying for pity; I just think they don’t always have the life experience to realize they will *need* to keep going. But the status of a certain mental illness, or a past trauma, is sometimes used as a bulwark against changing behavior or life circumstances.

How do we balance these two competing values: That those suffering should be taken seriously when they talk about their pain, and that perpetual suffering will only make things worse?

Much about your life is malleable — your friendships, your hobbies, your love life, your career, your housing situation, how you spend free time can all be changed in most circumstances. But when I read pieces like this, I often recall that in some cases, the defining circumstances of one’s life cannot be easily shifted. Someone too disabled to work, even temporarily, cannot easily move from an unhappy home situation (as the piece explicitly points to); someone in a field facing firings and financial stress (this is a nonprofit sector subtweet, cough cough) cannot easily change from a toxic job. Much as those factors are not life-defining, a bad career or bad home — and of course, bad health — can shift quality of life on a really major scale. Bad health in particular is, to varying degrees, a victimization.

But to understand oneself as not just victimized by, but as a victim, makes it easy to stay in that headspace permanently — even as a bad circumstance passes, or reduces. Even bad circumstances do not preclude you from making changes, and finding joy and peace.

I don’t have an answer to this. But I want to consider this difference between being victimized and being a victim, permanent and perpetual; between understanding one’s own circumstances, and refusing to change them. When life isn’t going well, you do something about it — you pick up a new hobby, make new friends, start cooking more, go to therapy and get on meds.

You cannot avoid it because it’s harder.

One more thing: I generally sometimes quibble with the ‘generational’ framing of victimization discourse in general. I perhaps have a bit of a unique perspective on this because due to my own family experiences, almost none of my primary experience with ‘people who stay in a depressive spiral for a long period of time’ is from gen-Z; I’ve met a lot of older people who live far more of a self-pitying life than my gen-Z social circle. (I also form all of my opinions of adhd discourse as someone with perhaps one of the least debilitating adhd cases I’ve ever met — from a family with a very clear genetic history.) That’s maybe worth another post, but I wanted to raise it here.