Reclaiming Resilience

Rebuilding Resilience

Joseph D. Sanns

PSYCH 307: Writing in Psychology

Dr. Richard Williams

16 April 2025

In contemporary society, mantras like "follow your heart," "be true to yourself," and "do what feels good" have become cultural norms. What may once have been reasonable advice in particular situations has become the default standard, encouraging people to elevate feelings to a level of moral authority. This reflects a broader cultural shift in which subjective emotion now trumps reason and faith tradition—two pillars that have long supported meaningful, resilient lives. The result of this shift has been an increase in emotional fragility (Haidt, 2024). While positing emotion as the foundation of moral life may seem empowering—since one becomes answerable only to oneself—its psychological consequences are deeply concerning. Chief among these is a marked decline in resilience.

This essay argues that the digital environment, which young people are deeply engaged in, amplifies the consequences of the replacement of reason and religion with emotion as a moral compass. The digital world rewards emotional immediacy while discouraging the slower development of inner fortitude. As a result, the structures that once formed strong individuals—ritual, discipline, and inherited wisdom—are replaced by curated feelings and social validation.

To many young people, life now unfolds within digital spheres where emotional expression is performed and broadcast. These expressions are intended to gain affirmation and attention. When emotion is treated as both a moral compass and social currency, it creates a fragile self. This fragility is especially pronounced among young people, who are the most active users of digital media and are at a stage marked by heightened vulnerability and immature emotional regulation. When moral life is rooted in impulse rather than reasoned thought or tradition, discipline feels like injustice, and hardship like harm.

These effects are already being measured. Studies indicate historic declines in young people’s capacity to endure adversity, regulate emotion, and recover from hardship—core components of psychological resilience (Scimeca, Faulkner, & Mar, 2022). Yet resilience is essential to human flourishing. Rebuilding it requires reinstituting the ethical and moral anchors that transcend emotion, viz. reason, tradition, and faith.

Reason and faith offer what the emotional self cannot: a perspective beyond the moment. Resilience is not just about enduring pain—it is about aligning difficulty with purpose. And purpose must be grounded in something more stable than how one feels. Without this integration, difficulty is met not with growth but retreat. Many young people today, when reality fails to accommodate their desires, retreat into victimhood, claiming harm where there may only be difficulty.

Social media keeps individuals in a state of constant emotional stimulation. It exposes users to endless streams of comparison, public judgment, and performative self-presentation. Real relationships are replaced with curated pseudo-connection, and meaning is reduced to attention. This encourages identity formation through validation rather than inner coherence. Attention spans shorten. Discomfort becomes intolerable. Challenge is reframed as threat. Emotional maturity is stunted.

To regain resilience, we must return to older sources of strength. Religious and moral traditions offered pathways for enduring suffering and integrating emotion into a broader ethical life. These traditions taught that emotion is real but not always right. Such traditions encouraged individuals to distinguish between feelings that come from God and those that do not, teaching people to examine their emotions rather than simply obey them. Practices like prayer, fasting, forgiveness, and repentance help individuals step out of emotional immersion and see the broader reality to which reason and revelation point.

Religious traditions provides the space where resilience can grow. Through commandments and covenants, individuals are invited into a life of service, sacrifice, and self-mastery. These are not acts of repression but alignment—where the self is ordered toward what is lasting rather than what is gratifying. Faith traditions teach that suffering can have meaning, that trials refine the soul, and that virtue is worth the cost. Reason helps individuals step outside themselves and aim at truth beyond mood or moment.

Resilience is not willpower alone. It develops when the self is anchored in something larger. In a culture that exalts emotion and avoids discomfort, resilience may become rare—but not unreachable. It can be restored. That restoration begins by reintroducing the moral disciplines and sacred obligations that made generations before us great. By recovering the wisdom of faith and the clarity of reason, emotion and feeling can become a source of strength and vigor, which builds strong lives (Dolcos et al., 2021).

References

Dolcos, F., Hohl, K., Hu, Y., Karam, A. M., Dolcos, S., Iordan, A. D., & Denkova, E. (2021). Religiosity and resilience: Cognitive reappraisal and coping self-efficacy mediate the link between religious coping and well-being. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 628894.

Haidt, J. (2012). The righteous mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Pantheon Books.

Haidt, J. (2024). The anxious generation: How the great rewiring of childhood is causing an epidemic of mental illness. Penguin Press.

Scimeca, D., Faulkner, M. K., & Mar, R. A. (2022). The role of emotion regulation and resilience in adolescent well-being in the digital age. Journal of Adolescent Research, 37(4), 521–543.