Beyond Resilience: Why I Think Bouncing Back Is the Wrong Goal After 60
Part of the New series on Cumulative Life Stress, The Ageing Body and What to Do Now: When The Body Has Kept a Score
We’ve all been told we need more resilience.
The ability to bounce back. To absorb difficulty and return to where we were. It sounds right. It’s become the dominant language for coping with a world that won’t slow down.
But I’ve started to wonder if it’s pointing us in the wrong direction.
Because returning to where we were isn’t always possible. And in a world changing at this pace — politically, climatically, technologically, personally — it may not even be desirable. The place we were no longer exists.
What I’ve been exploring in my own life, and increasingly in my work, is something different. Not resilience, but what I’d call fluid adaptability. The capacity to move with change rather than simply survive it. To meet unpredictability without being destabilised by it.
It sounds subtle but it changes everything practically. Resilience asks: can I get back to baseline? Fluid adaptability asks: can I move with this without it breaking me?
The distinction matters especially in the third third, when our baseline has genuinely changed — when chronic conditions, reduced energy, or the aftermath of significant life events mean we’re not going back to where we were. We’re finding a new way of being well.
That’s not failure. It’s actually the more sophisticated and more honest response to the life we’re living.
I’ll be writing more about what building that capacity looks like in practice. Some of it is about the body. Some of it is about the mind. And some of it is about something quieter than either.