With Covid-19, a new playbook on resilience

AS IT turns out, it's not true that a frog settles into a pot of water, warms slowly to a boil, and dies.

You know that story - if the temperature is just cranked up bit by bit, the amphibian supposedly gets cooked by its own oblivion. So don't be the frog that only jumps out when the water is bubbling hot.

Well, the frogs are fine. If the temperature gets a bit unbearable, they propel themselves out of the pot.

Death by a slow stew seems to be a time-honoured error of the haughtiest of mammals, instead. Humans are susceptible to being fooled by a deadly warmed-up bath.

Organisational psychologist Adam Grant points to this urban myth, and poses the question: why are people caught off-guard by a global pandemic? Or for that matter, climate change, or the damaging destruction of democracy?

"We fail to recognise the danger because we're reluctant to rethink the situation," said the Wharton professor in a TED talk.

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"We're happy to refresh our wardrobes and renovate our kitchens. But when it comes to our goals, identities and habits, we tend to stick to our guns. And in a rapidly changing world, that's a huge problem."

As the world continues to battle Covid-19 and its quick mutations, post-war modern society is in a state of being constantly unsettled. That a wildly infectious disease is just lurking, coolly taking lives, can render us limp with helplessness.

As governments make sober predictions that we might have to live with Covid-19 for the rest of the years ahead, - what do we? Turning wrinkly from hiding out in a hot tub seems most comforting under such circumstances.

But when we're done with a little stew, we should best figure out how to carry on, in spite of heavy uncertainties. And especially for millennials, this pandemic's biggest lesson - opportunity, even - is in defining our generation's mental grit.

To me, grit is not a matter of just persevering over and over again. The reality is that the world has fundamentally changed. There is no buzzy "new normal". This is it. The masks, the curbing of social mingling, the hybrid working arrangements, are the way forward.

Dr Grant will tell you that grit, as we conventionally know it, can be overrated. He says that the most dogged are more likely to overplay their hands in casino games. The most tenacious mountaineers are more likely to die on expeditions, because they're determined to do whatever it takes to reach the summit.

"There's a fine line between heroic persistence and stubborn stupidity. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting your teeth and packing your bags. 'Never give up' doesn't mean 'keep doing the thing that's failing'. It means 'don't get locked into one narrow path, and stay open to broadening your goals'," he said.

"The ultimate goal is to make it down the mountain, not just to reach the top."

Similarly, journalist and author David Epstein, in his book Range, said when parents stop their children from quitting an activity, they are also striking down a lesson on broader resilience. Knowing when to let go is as important as keeping at an activity that builds an enduring mental muscle.

Redefine what is smart

The other lesson for an assuredly volatile world today is that we should redefine what it means to be smart. Dr Grant points out that a deadset understanding of intelligence can sometimes trap us longer in an outdated belief. "Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking."

Tressie McMillan Cottom, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told The New York Times in a podcast that for all our emphasis on schooling, people resist learning. This is made worse by having standard ideas of what or who can be counted as smart.

"For all we valorise learning and education, human nature really trends towards inertia, and every layer of privilege you layer on top of somebody makes that more true. So what we're fundamentally saying to people who achieved something (is this) - part of the promise of the achievement was that I'll never have to learn anything new again," she said.

"A fixed idea of intelligence invites us to disinvest from the social contract of making more smart people. Just make more by expanding your understanding of it."

That makes sense. In a world of heightened uncertainty, a bigger view of human capital broadens discussions, informs our minds, and encourages more creative solutions. This isn't a feel-good strategy of social inclusion. It is necessary today.

Dr McMillan Cottom makes a case too for abandoning the mush of the past. That way, we can have better conversations about the future - dialogues that are awkward, honest, learned, and with more people.

"I am very resistant to nostalgia as a thing because usually what we are nostalgic for is a time that just was not that great for a lot of people. And so what we were usually and really nostalgic for is a time when we didn't have to think so much about who was missing in the room, who wasn't at the table," she says.

"Broadening access doesn't mean that everybody has the experience that I, a privileged person, had in the discourse. Broadening it means that we are all equally uncomfortable, right? That's actually what pluralism and plurality is."

The Covid-19 pandemic has thrown up very uncomfortable questions about our future. How will we rebuild funds thrown at a virus that has been relentless? How will the pie be more evenly distributed, as income inequalities become more pronounced, and run the risk of being calcified?

There is another old proverb about a frog who lived at the bottom of a well. It gazed daily at the world through the same, small, window. The "Covid generation" can scarcely afford that world view. To survive, it will first have to redefine what survival means in the future. The hope is we get the right to tear up the old playbooks, so we can write our own.