How Hybrid Work Solves the Resilience Gap

Nothing is more essential to personal or professional success than resilience: the ability to rethink, reorganize and recover when your plans go awry. Resilience is what allows us to find another path forward when we hit a roadblock; to let go of what we expected and instead open to what is; to bounce back from disappointment or heartbreak with something like good grace or even good cheer.

But the modern world and workplace have chipped away at the structures that enable resilience. Fewer and fewer of us have extended family nearby, so there’s nobody to turn to if you have a kid who’s sick or an injury that makes it hard to get to the grocery store. Extended working hours and the pressure of always-on communication mean that we have little opportunity to reflect and regenerate, so that we’re often frayed and exhausted. Two-career families that depend on overtime to pay the bills, college admission standards that demand kids participate in heaps of extracurriculars, social-media platforms that imply we should be packing our lives full of parties and adventures while maintaining a beautiful home, face and body: They all conspire to keep us running at 120% capacity, 100% of the time.