On Resilience and Entitlement - My Grandmother’s life in perspective

A few months ago someone on a team briefing said that the food in our canteen was ‘like prison food’. I was not present but what immediately jumped to mind was ‘How do you know?’ and should we maybe check your pre-employment history?

On a more serious note, I doubt the canteen food deserves that label. Our colleagues pay ￡3 for a full meal, either Western or Korean (with Samsung picking up the balance to full cost), with various combinations as options including a full salad bar as an alternative. It is not perfect and we can certainly improve it but it is hardly 'prison food'. So my second thought was - If you don’t like it, find your own lunch solution.

What this episode points to is just one tiny example of an incredible sense of entitlement I have seen in recent years amongst our colleagues. I am not overly hopeful for the next 5-15 years in world affairs and whilst I’m no oracle I am concerned about the possibility of further destabilisation in the world (translate that as you wish). When I think of this I start to wonder how western society will adapt to the worst possible outcomes. We appear to be weak, entitled and insufficiently resilient.

As I was contemplating this, I realised I had a case study in my family about resilience - my beloved grandmother’s life story. She passed away in 2016 at the age of 92 and she has been the most loving and caring person I have ever known. Always positive and never complaining despite what she has lived through. Let me re-cap key moments from her life, hopefully in a way that helps with imagining it:

• she is 5 years old, the Great Depression hits the world and within a short period, affects even Central Europe (my grandmother was born in Kosice, in today's Slovakia, into a Hungarian family)
• she is a teenager when her father loses all of their money on horse betting and commits suicide leaving his wife with five children, his widow having to scramble to provide for the children (she opens a soup kitchen of sorts) but they still live in extreme poverty
• she is 15 when World War II breaks out
• to escape poverty, reduce the burden on her mother and to have a chance at a better life, at age 16, she marries a military man of the 'royal' Hungarian army (you might recall Hungary was not on the winning side in the war) and moves to a small town with her now husband in what is today's Hungary
• she gives birth to her first daughter (of eventually four daughters) at age 17
• Hungary is on the losing side of World War II when she is 20 years of age - the country completely devastated, her husband of a political persuasion and profession that does not 'look good' on a CV - with three daughters by this time (the last one, my mother, arrives when she is 22)
• there is relative calm until she is 31 when her husband participates in the 1956 Hungarian uprising which is quashed by the Soviet Union - and then gets arrested awaiting trial; at this moment, she has no husband, no income (she stayed at home as was the tradition at the time), four children, no education (as was often the case) but she starts to work through friendly connections, without any qualifications, first as a dentist's assistant, then a salesperson in a grocery store, to make ends meet
• two years later (at 33), with the reprisals in full swing, her husband is convicted to a longer prison term as a 'counter-revolutionary'
• the three oldest daughters - on account of their father's 'sins' - are expelled from secondary school and the only place that will accept them is a school run by the somewhat still tolerated Catholic church, in the other end of the country - for a fee
• she is 35 when she and her imprisoned husband divorce on the recommendation of a lawyer, 'freeing' her from the 'stain' of being the wife of a counter-revolutionary to enable her to bring her children back to their home town and to access free education as she can't sustain the school fees any longer
• a couple of years later her husband gets amnesty, leaves prison but decides - now that he is 'free' - to marry his childhood love rather than return to his wife and children
• my grandmother finds work at a cooperative (the communist version) where she eventually completes a number of courses and progresses into different positions before retirement
• She buries one of her daughters in later years but otherwise lives a healthy life in a small apartment, looking after all of her grandchildren, supporting her daughters when they need it (her baking was legendary!)

It is easy to criticise someone else like I did with the entitled colleague I mention at the beginning. In truth, I am not sure I could sanely survive what my grandmother went through. I suspect our expectation since WWII has been one of increased prosperity and that every generation will live a better life and some of these terrible events of the past will fade. I also suppose with the period of peace and prosperity, especially in Western Europe and other developed countries, we - including me - take more and more things for granted and eventually we get more and more 'entitled'.

My grandmother must have felt devastated on many occasions in her younger life - yet it must also have led her to become incredible resilient, resourceful and eventually reassured (when I knew her, she definitely did not take any s*** from anyone).

I may be entirely wrong in my forecast of things to come in the world (and I honestly hope that I am) - but if I'm not, how will we and especially the younger generations deal of today deal with the storm? How will they develop resilience? How do we prepare them for 'real life' rather than try to prepare 'life for them'?

Perhaps a dose of 'reality', a pinch of 'tough love', feedback that is 'straight between the eyes' might be needed - not for anyone to re-live the desperations my grandmother went through - but to build back some of the resilience that we might have lost.

Then again, I may be all wrong.