Resilience Is a Used Future

A summer dispatch on shedding worn-out language, and listening for what comes next.

Photo by American Jael on Unsplash

Every season brings a different kind of clarity. In summer, the light lasts longer. Ideas stretch out. Some truths arrive slowly—but stay with you.

Here’s one that’s been staying with me:

Resilience is a used future.

A used future—as futurist Sohail Inayatullah defines it—is a vision we’ve inherited from someone else, often without realizing it. It might have been useful once. It might have helped us survive. But now, it limits what we can imagine. It clutters the path forward.

And resilience is one of those words.

One of those futures.

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We’re told it’s a virtue: Be resilient. Build resilient systems. Fund resilient communities.

The word itself—resilience—comes from the Latin resilire: to bounce back, to rebound.

But bounce back to what?

Resilience is often framed as strength—but at its core, it’s about return.

And too often, that return means reshaping ourselves to fit systems that were never meant to hold us well.

But in a world where time is not linear—and the past isn’t behind us—we have to ask: Is returning what we need at all?

That’s when the deeper questions begin to surface: Resilient to what? Resilient for how long? Resilient so we can return to what?

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Resilience, as it’s often used, is quiet about the conditions it demands we endure.

It praises survival, but not transformation.

It centers durability, not justice.

It tells us we’re strong enough to take it—when what we really need is a break in the cycle.

Especially in public work—in cities, philanthropy, education, and organizing—resilience has become a kind of code.

It sounds like care, but it often masks inertia.

It asks individuals to bend, not systems to change.

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Resilience asks us to bend without breaking.

But what if breaking is where the real design begins?

I’m more interested in the futures we haven’t found language for yet—the ones rooted in collective reimagining.

This isn’t about finding the perfect word.

It’s about making space for a vocabulary that doesn’t exist yet—because we haven’t built the world it belongs to.

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A Small Practice: Is Resilience a Used Future for You?

If you want to explore this further, try this simple word audit:

1. Write the word resilience in the middle of a page.

2. Around it, jot down what comes to mind:

   1. Where have you heard it?

   2. Who usually says it?

   3. What is it describing?

   4. What kinds of futures does it seem to protect or assume?

   5. What’s underneath it—control, care, exhaustion, hope?

3. Now gently ask:

   1. Is this word still opening up possibility—or closing it down?

   2. Is it describing transformation—or just survival?

   3. Is it time to set it down—or to reimagine what it means?

You don’t need to land anywhere final. Just begin to notice.

And if you do, I’d love to hear what you find—feel free to share your reflections in the comments.