Hello. I'm here to talk to you about fantasy today, but before that, you may have noticed I have a new thing. Look it. It's a plushie and it's me. See? Wait, no. Hold on. I gotta put the glasses on. It's me. See? Isn't that amazing? I teamed up with Gimme Swag recently and we are making a whole line of these. So, if you want one, and you should want one, obviously. I mean, look at this thing. It's the best. It's adorable. It's just me. But if you want one, then check the link in the pinned comment down below for more information. These are limited time. You know, you can't wait forever. Please go ahead. Grab one as soon as you can. Look at his feet move. This is the introduction song. It's not very good, but it's not too long. So, fantasy. And I don't know if you can hear it raining outside. I apologize if you can. So, fantasy. I love fantasy. That should be no surprise to anyone who watches this channel. Like you can see this whole shelf right here next to me. This is all fantasy in sci-fi and it's not even close to my entire collection. There's a lot of it and there's a lot of different types of fantasy. You know, there's epic fantasy, urban fantasy, low fantasy, anime fantasy, which is very much its own thing. There's a whole bunch of different types and they're all different. They're all still fantasy and they're all great in their own ways. But all genres do have issues, you know, because a genre is something that, well, when things are in the same genre, that implies that they have similar settings and similar story types, similar story structures, they have similar character archetypes, you know, things like that. And so as a result, genres do have problems. And a lot of times those problems are similar across a lot of different entries in that genre. And sometimes an entire genre will just hit a rut and be stuck in there for a while until somebody comes up with new ideas and helps elevate it out of that. Like I feel epic fantasy was in a rut for a long, long time until Mistborn came along and I don't want to assign the entirety of the genre's success to Mistborn, but Mistborn was something different that inspired people to try different things. And you know, I just wanted to point out things in different subgenres of fantasy that really annoy me, that I just, I don't know, I just wanted to point out the problems and come up with some hypothetical solutions for them. First up is gonna be epic fantasy. Now epic fantasy is basically what a lot of people think of when they hear the term fantasy, you know, this is something like Lord of the Rings or Wheel of Time or Stormlight Archive. It's something that takes place in a world completely different than our own, at least usually. Sometimes it's like our world in the future, but I've talked about that enough. That's kind of dumb. It's usually an epic story about characters taking on world-threatening events and trying to save the world. It usually has really, really huge casts. There's huge battles all over the place most of the time. And that is basically what most people think of when they think of fantasy, but that is epic fantasy. And I love epic fantasy, but my biggest problem with it by far is that so often these stories, they need to be long, but they do not need to be bloated. And that's what happens. The stories and the casts just become bloated. Like there's too much there. Like this is a genre where it's very common for books, that book series that are supposed to be like trilogies to turn into like seven books. You know, A Song of Ice and Fire I believe was originally planned as five books. And now it's a planned seven, the last two of which is that they're just never coming out. It's not happening guys. Like the third book, or excuse me, the fourth book, A Feast for Crows, was originally supposed to be everything from Feast for Crows and everything from A Dance with Dragons. But George Trevlar Martin just wrote too much and realized, hey, there's too much here. I guess I'll split it into two books. Wheel of Time was originally supposed to be a six book series, and it wound up being 14 books and a prequel. Like I don't know if mission creep is the right term, but let's call it like story creep. You know, that is a thing that happens a lot in Epic Fantasy. Like it just, the authors keep going, oh, what if we added this? Oh, what if we added that? It'd be cool if we put this in. And then in order to put that thing in that they think is cool. I'm sorry, like there's something caught in my eyelashes is not going away no matter what I do. And in order to put the thing in that they think is cool, they first have to justify it, which means building up to it earlier in the story, adding characters that relate to it in some way. It means putting in more world buildings so that it is justified and so that you can build up to it. Like just you have to add in a whole lot of stuff before you can even get to the thing, which is sometimes just underwhelming, but whatever.  And the publishers and editors just let them get away with this sort of thing. And so these stories, these series just get way, way, way too long. This leads to issues with pacing. Like I mentioned Wheel of Time earlier and that is a series that is infamous for having what fans call The Slog, which is this big chunk in the middle of several books that are each like 700 pages where almost nothing happens and it's just very, very difficult to get through. And for whatever reason, it also leads to a lot more romance than you would normally expect and it's never good. Because like, again, they have to add in these new characters in order to justify stuff that's going on and these characters like, well, we have to give them some personality and a lot of times what they do to give them some personality and some development is just have them develop romances, but the romances are almost never good. And this is basically why A Song of Ice and Fire and King Killer Chronicles are never going to be finished. Like I mentioned, Song of Ice and Fire, it's never being finished. Winds of Winter, Dream of Spring, they're just not coming out.  And same with King Killer Chronicles. Like the second book was not entirely filler but largely filler. And so the author just doesn't know how to squeeze everything into the final book and he kind of hamstrung himself so he can't just stretch it out even more. It has to be a trilogy. So like it just, we're just not getting final books because these things just let themselves get too bloated. The solution to this and I'm not just gonna give something really vague like oh just cut out unnecessary subplots or anything like that. I'm going to give something a little more specific and that is trim down the character cast. Like take all the characters you have. Like if you have dozens of named characters, just take like 10% of them, get rid of them all together. You know, like again part of this mission creep of these Epic Fantasy series is often that they will throw in minor characters and then feel the need to expand on them and give them entire long storylines or they introduce like a new area or a new small subplot and so they have to introduce a new character whose POV we can follow for at least a little while to introduce us to that and a lot of times this just, well it wastes a lot of time. Like not every plot point needs a new POV character to explain. Like sometimes you can just imply that things happen off screen. You don't need to tell us all the details and sometimes you can have characters that are already established witness it and even though that occasionally can feel contrived to have the same people going all over the place and seeing important events everywhere but you know if you're smart about it it won't feel contrived and also just let minor characters be minor characters. You know, they don't all need to have really rich backstories and lives and developments and everything. You know, like Lester Borns in Mistborn is a pretty good example of this. Like in the first two books he's there, he does things, he has some personality, he helps out with the main cast and everything but he's not really that important, he doesn't have a whole lot of development, he doesn't have his own story arc or anything. It's really only in the third book that he becomes more important and I mean that's fine but I mean like his character in the first two books is a pretty good example of a minor character just being a minor character and still adding to the story and a lot of epic fantasy stories could learn from that example. Like just trim down the character cast and you will trim the fat without even really trying beyond that. Next up we have young adult fantasy I'm gonna be honest it's kind of weird that this is a genre because genre like I said earlier implies that stories will have similar settings, similar character archetypes, similar types of stories being told whereas young adult just makes it sound like it's stories that are aimed at young adults. You know they don't necessarily have anything in common beyond that but at some point YA fantasy did become an entire genre. I say at some point or for some reason like it was thrown up glass. Like that was it.  This would be stuff like again thrown up glass or an ember in the ashes or lightlark or children of blood and bone or a dozen others and these tend to be defined by main characters who are just ultra special chosen ones you know they have everything about them you know they have like the coolest magic powers ever they are the bestest fighters of all time everybody loves them they're so beautiful they're the chosen one they're also possibly the lost heir to the kingdom and this this will be like all all in one character you know they this genre is very much defined by ultra special marysu protagonists it's also sometimes defined by having casts that are way too small which is kind of weird that's like the opposite problem that epic fantasy has but a lot of times young at all fantasy will have everything happening to the same small group of people and it feels like the rest of the world doesn't even exist outside of them it's also typically defined by a really really really heavy focus on romance like don't think i need to explain that one much more than than that it's just there's a very heavy focus on it it's there and i know i know i'm sounding like really harsh here i kind of wish i didn't hate this genre because a lot of times it does have like really really good setup for setups for stories like i've mentioned before that lightlark has a really good setup for a cool story it just does nothing with it and i feel the same about a lot of other young at all fantasy uh and occasionally i'll find something i like and by occasionally i'll find something i like i mean i liked an ember in the ashes and that's it but you know like there it could be worse you know i just blame sarah j mos for the current state of things so that's a lot of problems there but what's the biggest problem you know it's not the fact that romance takes up a heavy part of the story because i mean i'm usually not into that and a lot of times the romances are bizarre and toxic but that's not really the issue that's that's more just like okay don't do a toxic romance but that's easier said than done and i don't think anyone is going to listen to me anyways because that just all romances seem to be toxic it seems the problem isn't even like the the main characters being like ultra special chosen ones because i can theoretically see how that would work or at least how it would bother me less if it were in a better story like if we had the ultra special chosen one story and just put them into a series actually like like i don't know Mistborn or something then i would not like that it would drag the story down but i think overall i'd still enjoy it so that's not the issue it's not that these things are always spy plots i swear to god like every YA fantasy is just a spy plot you know it is just main character needs something in order to get something she has to infiltrate the stronghold of the evil people and pretends to not be ultra special powerful Mary Sue girl and while she's there she falls in love with a bad boy or something like that's not that's all of them all of them are spy plots it's really annoying but that's not the biggest issue the biggest issue by far which does kind of tie into all these others is the general lack of creativity or imagination and i know that that's vague so let me explain myself fantasy is a genre where you can just really go crazy in a lot of ways like the setting and the magic and everything you can go really really nuts with that but YA fantasy never does like it is almost always the exact same thing or something very similar to the exact same thing like it's almost always based on medieval europe the worlds don't have a whole lot of depth to them like there'll be a map and that's it like we'll have one kingdom which is vaguely good i guess and we'll have the evil empire which wants to expand and conquer everything and then there'll be like a magic kingdom i guess which is like usually the fey realm because all these books are about having sex with fairies for some reason and sometimes they'll use a different culture to base this off of but even then it still winds up feeling like the exact same thing with a slightly different surface level level aesthetic like i mentioned children of blood and bone that one is based on west african mythology and everything which is really really neat and i thought it'd be different but it's it's not it's just the exact same world exact same setting but it's slightly different on the surface that's it and ember in the ashes again i like it and that one's based more on a middle eastern mythology and folklore but that one is largely again the same thing only instead of fairies doing crazy things we have jinn doing crazy things you know it's it like these are all pretty much the same and it's not even that they're all the same but that like none of them really go crazy and do anything cool or uh well crazy you know like think about all the ya fantasy you can think of it at least if you're a fan of the genre like are there any locations in any of those books that are anything like say luthadel from mistborn where it's the capital city of this thousand-year-old empire run by an immortal demigod who most people never even see and it's near these volcanoes which are constantly erupting and dropping ash down on top of everything and these mists come out at night and the mist almost seems alive like is there anything like that or how about the fey realm from king killer chronicles you know like where a place where time doesn't exist and there's all these crazy creatures running around including a demon who is trapped in a tree and he can see into the future and if you ever interact with him he knows exactly how you will react to anything he says so he's going to say something to you that will cause the maximum amount of death and destruction or basically any of the demon realms from the demonata which like there are some really nutty ones in there like the one made entirely out of spider webs or the one where the entire realm is itself a living demon made of fire and when they kill the demon the entire realm vanishes like or this one's not a book but uh landel from elden ring which is this gigantic abandoned city like you go through and everything is destroyed and sealed up and when you first enter you see the corpse of this gigantic dragon just in the middle of the city we don't know exactly how it died but that implies a couple of things uh and underneath all and it's all underneath this gigantic tree it's glowing it's several kilometers tall like it's so massive that if you stood at the base of it you couldn't even see the entire width of the trunk like these are crazy crazy locations and that's one of the great parts of fantasy but young adult fantasy never really does anything like that with its locations or it's magic you know magic tends to be very simple and to the point and a lot of times again because of thrown of glass and actually i will say thrown of glass uh has one cool location and that is the gigantic glass castle that the first book mostly takes place in you know it's again a castle made entirely of glass it's like hundreds and hundreds of feet tall it just dominates this entire city it's enormous you know that that's kind of cool i i did like that uh but anyways magic tends to be very simple and to the point in these series like it is this person can make fire this person can transform and there's really nothing else to it besides that it's just yeah we can do cool things with magic and we don't really have to spend a long time learning how to use it and the only cost to it is that we get kind of tired while we're using it and the main character doesn't get tired easy she has the bestest powers whoo this is not a problem that epic fantasy has because epic fantasy has in the past couple of decades been giving out these really weird crazy out there magic systems like just off the top of my head what if and if you're a young adult author feel free to use this please uh what if there was a magic system that was controlled by injuring yourself you know like if you give yourself a paper cut then that would release a bit of power and you could do something small with that if you broke your finger you could do something bigger with that if you cut your entire arm off then you could do something really crazy but then you you don't have an arm so you know you gotta weigh the risk and reward of this you know like you know just off the top of my head something like that you know something really crazy and neat like that would be interesting and this is all the solution that i'm getting at like you know the the problem is lack of creativity and imagination just use creativity and imagination like even if you leave the plot the exact same which you shouldn't like you know use a little bit more creativity there to try and do different things with it but even if you left like the plot the same and the character archetypes all the same just by having uh the settings be really weird out there like that you would do crazy stuff with it and it would be much more interesting and much more fun to read you know and you don't necessarily have to be like crazy out there and imaginative and come up with something no one else has ever done before but just do something cool with it like again the castle of glass from throne of glass is cool it's not the most imaginative thing ever but it it's neat next up is going to be urban fantasy now urban fantasy is fantasy that takes place mostly in an urban setting in cities and it's usually when people talk about it they're referring to series book series where it takes place in our world but there is a hidden magical underground in there and a lot of times urban fantasy will also be more light-hearted than other stuff not always but a lot of times like several years ago i read a book called doppelgangster which is a really fun book by the way and i actually don't read a whole lot of urban fantasy but that one is really good what's the biggest problem with urban fantasy well to me it's that the world is never really integrated with ours like the magical world is never integrated with ours like it keeps itself hidden from ordinary view and other than that it is just its own thing you know the two don't really interact with or affect one another in any real way and a lot of times it's hidden just because you know i've gone on about this many times i know but like i always find myself wondering like okay sure with modern technology maybe humans could overpower the magical creatures and kill them all if they felt like it so they stay hidden like that makes sense that wasn't the case like 3 000 years ago so why didn't they do anything with their crazy powers that most people have don't have that back then you know they could have taken over and ruled the entire world back then and then prevented humanity from developing any of the technology we have now like that i don't know like there's never really a reason given for why it's hidden this is a problem that people have brought up with harry potter over the past however many years like there's a lot of talk about how okay why don't the human the muggle and wizard worlds interact at all like even if the majority of people don't know about it like wouldn't they still affect each other in some ways and like just hand wavy um and suddenly that they apparently just they they just exist that way i don't know it doesn't make sense and a lot of urban fantasy is like that so what is the solution to this well it's to integrate the worlds more and again i know that's vague so let me explain what if the mayor of the city that it takes place in is a wizard you know he's not open about it but he uses magic to help himself in his political career in some subtle ways like he could be a villain he could be the main character he could be a side character that the heroes just interact with briefly like there's a lot you could do with this and it shows that okay these two worlds do interact with and affect one another in some ways or how about there's a bunch of fairies who have to move their underground dwelling because there's a housing development being built there and like that could just be a small detail or you could build the whole plot around that really or hell how about what if vampires controlled the stock market somehow you know just an idea like that like how do these worlds interact with and affect one another at all you could do that in a funny way you could do it in a dramatic way but just i don't know it feels like a lot of the time urban fantasy is only urban fantasy because they want to have maximum wish fulfillment and projection for the people reading it they want them to be able to go oh he just like me for real for real when the main character like is a badass detective who gets all the girls and gets to go on an adventure while also living in the same mundane world that they live in speaking of pointless projection and power fantasy next up is isekai now isekai just means different world or other world in japanese so basically any story where a character goes from our world into some other crazy world to go on adventures it could technically be an isekai you know classics like alice in wonderland gulliver's travels the wizard of Oz the odyssey like those would all be isekai but when i say isekai really i'm referring to the modern trend in japanese anime manga and light novels which is where total blanks blank slate like literally zero personality zero life before the events of the story main character who is always a japanese teenage boy somehow gets sent to another world it's usually not explained all that well like a lot of times it's just hey you died and now you're being reincarnated into this other world have fun good luck and then when main character koon goes to this other world he just has crazy powers for no reason like this is the male equivalent of young adult fantasy basically like he just has crazy powers for no reason a lot of the time and so he just steamrolls most of his obstacles and then there's basically no plot or structure like there's no goal he's working towards he doesn't want to go home he doesn't want to defeat the bad guys he's just kind of chilling in this world going from place to place being awesome and then there's also a harem of hot girls who are really really into him but he never starts any relationships with any of them they never kiss or hold hands or have sex or anything they are just kind of there and sometimes one of them will get jealous and physically assault him and that's like comedy i guess so that yeah that that's isekai that's what i'm referring to here now this one is like young adult fantasy and they both have many many different problems that they suffer from a lot of the time however with this one the single biggest problem is that there is no plot or structure whatsoever like it is often just main character koon wandering from battle to battle occasionally he'll add new harem members and because he's just so overpowered he's boring to watch you know it's not fun to watch him and go like oh i wonder how he's gonna get out of this great like he just overpowers everybody goes through it and because he is just a complete blank character with no definable personality or redeeming characteristics or anything he's not interesting to watch in that way either so even people who are really into this type of power fantasy or something will get bored pretty quickly of this let that be a lesson to all writers of all stripes if you want your readers to be invested in the story there has to feel like there's some progress being made and that's the solution to this one just give it a fucking plot dude you know i think that's so basic that i feel like i shouldn't have to explain it but apparently i do like just give it a plot give it a story you know main character koon goes there and what does he want to do like he maybe he wants to go home and so the whole adventure is his long-ass journey trying to get home and all of the side quests and distractions he has to go on on the way there like you could do a lot with that make a long-running series make it short who cares or what if there's an evil demon lord who has taken over everything and he's the chosen one that's there to stop him so he has to go to various places and gather up allies and use them to defeat the armies of the demon king like you know he goes to this place and there's a problem there and once he helps the people with the problem there then suddenly they're free and they can go help him then he goes to the next place and does that and then at the end there's big final battle and this is basically the plot to dragon age origins but whatever that game is awesome so like yeah just if you want to make a good isekai just make it dragon age origins there you go and last up on the list today is going to be low slash dark fantasy now these are not the same thing i have gone over this before low fantasy versus high fantasy is a spectrum of how much magic and magical elements are in your story like you know if there's a whole bunch of elves running around and magic is all over the place and tons of other weird stuff in there that's high fantasy or if it is mostly mundane and only a little bit of magic and everything in there like game of thrones being the most obvious example that's low fantasy whereas dark fantasy is as the name implies stuff that is you know darker in terms of tone like there's a lot more death and rape and destruction and all sorts of uh unpleasantness in there like low fantasy and dark fantasy have a lot of overlap which is why i'm talking about them together but they're not the same thing like you can have high fantasy that is really dark and depressing in tone like dark souls being a good example and you could theoretically have low fantasy which is still like fun and whimsical low slash dark fantasy is as i was saying often defined by having very little actual fantasy elements in there like that occasionally will pop up but there's not a lot of them there's a lot of death and torture and horrible things happening to people characters are constantly dying left right and center etc basically just anything that was trying to rip off game of thrones and cash in on that success which i think that slowed down now but for a couple of years there there were a lot of television shows that were trying to cash in on that and there's just anything like that that's what i'm talking about here so what's the problem well a lot of times they aren't dark so much as edgy like and there's also so little fantasy that doesn't even feel like fantasy it feels like a historical drama like instead of having characters die in order to like be shocking and have it make sense with their character arc or anything they'll just introduce a whole bunch of characters one right after another and then develop them and like oh the audience will care now and then kill them off and be like oh aren't you shocked and like the first time it works but then they do it three four five six more times and it just you stop getting attached to them uh because all of these people keep dying but then the main core cast still stays the same you know so and then obviously they throw in like a bunch of sexual assaults and stuff not for any like intelligent reason they're not really handling it in any impressive intelligent way it's just there so making go oh that person's bad oh this world is dark and then again like there's so little fantasy here rather than the fantasy showing up occasionally and it's like a big deal when it shows up you know like at the end of the first season of Game of Thrones when the dragon showed up that's a big deal or hell even then the first scene of that show when the white walkers first appear you're like oh god this is a big deal uh because it's contrasted with all of this mundane stuff surrounding it and as the show goes on and we just get more and more used to the mundane stuff once the magical stuff kicks up it just is a really big deal but if you don't actually have the magical stuff then it doesn't do that the solution to this problem I know this might sound counterintuitive but trust me on this just put less death in there like I really mean that just put less death in your low fantasy stories that way it means more when it actually happens like again I keep going back to Game of Thrones but this is like really the best example of this sort of thing and everyone in their grandmother who's doing this is just trying to be Game of Thrones but throughout the first season there aren't any major character deaths until Ned Stark is killed like before that like sure side characters are dying so we understand like yes this is a harsh world and bad things happen but we feel like the main core cast is safe and then Ned Stark dies and it's like oh that's a big deal and as the series goes on like core cast members do die but it is still done sparingly and when it does happen it's a big deal like if they did that every other episode then well it just it just wouldn't work that well like just use less death but still have it there and you'll hit that balance where it'll work a lot better as dark fantasy slash low fantasy and on top of that the magical elements like put a little bit more of them in there like if you can't think of how to put more in there just base the main conflict around magic you know like again Game of Thrones the first scene of that show is some dudes getting killed by snow zombies in the woods so from the beginning we know that the magical snow zombies the magical threat is a threat and then as the show goes on like sure we're invested in all of this fighting over the Iron Throne and Daenerys conquering her whole area thing yeah yeah yeah we're invested in all that but we know in the back of our minds even when the white walker threat isn't being focused on that that is there and that will kill everyone if they don't do something to stop it so the main conflict sort of is based in that and if you do that if you have the main conflict based in some sort of magic then even with uh the rest of everything around that not being that magical you will still feel fantastical it'll still feel like fantasy and then when the magical elements really show up it's a big deal like another example of this would be Carnival Row like most of the magic in that show is like it's not common there's not a lot of it but the primary conflict of season one is trying to go after this serial killer who's using weird magical stuff and a big part of the world is the uh racism and divides between all the different races like there's humans and there's like fairies and satyrs and like just all these magical races and everything so the main conflict is still rooted in the fantastical elements it's still rooted in the fantasy part of the story that's all i have for today uh so let me know down below what what are some of the biggest problems you have with subgenres of fantasy and how would you like to see them fixed you know like i i saw some people on my discord mentioned that they really hated that especially in young adult fantasy they hated that oh all the people with magic are horribly oppressed when it would really make more sense to do it the other way around you know like that that is a weird weirdly common trope i don't know why it's a thing but you know examples like that like what are some things that annoy you in various genres of fantasy how would you fix them uh i don't know how to end these things i'm never good at ending these things uh follow me on social media subscribe if you haven't liked the video patreon i do words good goodbye wow you you're still watching i i mean i guess i appreciate it but i'm not sure why i mean at this point all that we have left is all these names here these are my patrons and including my ten dollar and up patrons aposavalanan olivia reyan brother santotes buffy valentine carolina clay dan ancelia vich dark king don deo echo flax carcat kitsune lexie delorm lyza rudakova lord tiebreaker microphone mist boy peep the toad roby reviews sad martigan sillier the vixen stone stairs tesla shark vei victus and wesley these are all great people you know let me let me just let me tell you if you want to get your name on here then consider donating to me once a month become a patron or if you don't feel like doing that or you just can't because you know you're like poor or whatever no shame in that uh then just you know rate the video comment on it subscribe share it around spam it to all your friends and uh yeah goodbye


Our next speaker is Professor Alex Zautra, who is visiting us from our future tense partner, Arizona State University. Professor Zautra is the psychology professor there at ASU. He researches the role of stress and emotions on people's capacity to sustain well-being and recover from illness and other life challenges. Professor Zautra. Do I start this myself? Oh, just come on. Oh, great. Well, as a psychologist, I guess the question I'd like to ask you, primarily, is how the kinds of the ways we think about people and their capacities to adapt can help you design better cities, better companies, and better communities, I guess, in general. What I'm going to do today is basically give you an illustration of the methods, definitions of resilience, the methods we use to inquire about it, illustrating it with a study we're just about to complete on resilience in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Resilience is first defined, really, in psychology by a developmental psychologist, Mattson, who called it ordinary magic, which stressed the capacities of people, primarily most people, to recover, even children from the most traumatic experiences. Yet, of course, in psychology, we know there are differences between people, between communities that deserve study to inform public policy. Who are the resilient people? Where do they live? And what makes some more resilient than others are the kinds of questions we inquire about. The study I'm going to describe is one of resilience in midlife, and it looks to the... I look to provide you with a way of looking at the psychological methods of inquiry that you may find useful in your own work. So, this first slide gives you an idea of the way in which psychologists, or our group in particular, is defining resilience. And so, first of all, it's more than recovery. I mean, recovery, bouncing back, is pretty fundamental to defining what resilience is in the Oxford Dictionary. But it also means sustainability, which for, when defined for individuals and families and groups, it has to do with this keep-on-trucking kind of capacity. Sheri, we're talking a bit about that in hospitals too. So, when facing a crisis, we do put our current interests usually aside, but how quickly can we get back on track and not lose focus on what matters to us most? That is that sense of purpose that drives individual and group motivation. The third sort of ingredient of resilience that we will find useful is growth. And here we're talking about individual, but also family, community growth. And growth in this sense, I mean, in terms of learning, adapting to change, so becoming in case more stronger, more capable than you were before. So, in a sense, resilience is a directional vector toward the non-zero sum and using Robert Wright's terminology that people can become in facing and adapting to adversity stronger and more capable than they were before. And in that sense, growth from the experience. So, those are the three sort of dimensions or capacity of resilience that our group looks at. And the study I'm going to illustrate, used to illustrate some of these points is the study we're just finishing I mentioned in resilience in midlife in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Now, why do we study middle age? Well, first of all, it's a major demographic group that's with increasing health needs. Second, middle age is when healthy and ill populations begin to diverge and the vulnerabilities to chronic illness become evident, but also maybe the resilience resources within the person and in their relationships with others also become more evident. So, I guess I better advance the slide so you know what I'm talking about here. So, in this particular study, we studied 800 people in 40 Phoenix metropolitan neighborhoods over the last five years funded thanks National Institute on Aging for this study, for the funds to do this study. So, we examined forces both good and bad within individuals and their social worlds and distinguished those who successfully adapt to adversity from those who do not. So, this wheel gives you an idea of the kinds of variables we study. It includes the study of place, stresses both the intensity and nature of stresses on the people's lives, the individual differences both in personality and genetic profiles, and physiological temper of the person that we study. So, one of the questions we ask is, how does neighborhood or community matter for resilience? These are those points I just made. And, of course, Phoenix metropolitan area being a big place, this consists not just of one community, but many different types of communities. So, one of the first things we did was define with the help of a geographer, Pat Grober, the community types that we're dealing with in the Phoenix metropolitan area. Here we used ethnic mix, median age, and whether or not there's a child in the home. Those of us who are now empty nesters, we know the difference between having a child in the home and one not, both benefit and loss. We randomly selected four census areas from each of these 10 types, and then we interviewed 10 men and 10 women from each of the census tracts. That means 10 types, four tracts in each type, randomly selected, and 20 people per track or those to 800 people. One of the big questions when examining the capacities of people to be resilient is resilience is always a response to change, stressful change. So, focus has to be in part on what types of stressors and how intense they are in the populations that we're investigating. Stress has come in many varieties, and these are just some examples here. Job loss, for example, includes not only financial strain, but a challenge to ego identity. Marital strife often leads to family and crisis, and it's often the most difficult to adapt to. Why? Because social identity is challenged fundamentally by marital strife. One not up on this list but is also evident in the study of people between the ages of 40 and 65 as they move toward older age is increasing chronic illness and how people adapt to chronic illness and adjust their lives to sustain themselves is pretty fundamentally questioned to ask ourselves in this community. Whether it's chronic pain from arthritis or fatigue from drugs for the treatment of another illness, these are substantially important stressors that shape the lives of middle-aged people. So how do we do it? One way we do it is with questionnaires. So we give people four self-report questionnaires to fill out. They spend about two and a half hours doing this. We pay them about $120 apiece just to fill out the questionnaires. Some are on neighborhood, some are on social connections, current ones. We also look at childhood attachment and trauma and then measures of personality. We employ telephone interviews for each of these people. In the telephone interviews, we ask people to discuss the most stressful event in their lives and we've recorded those. We now have 800 stories of resilience from Arizona residents and we're beginning to unwrap the narratives of those people to help inform us about the qualitative nature of resilience because often people will say, yes, I grew or I learned or I recovered completely, but the quality of their answers provides us with a great deal more detail about the quality of their resilient responses. So we use other measures as well. I'll just alert you to these. We do home visits because we do collect blood samples. We do genetic profiles. We identify stress hormones and immune markers for the population. We do daily diaries because, well, measures of everyday life. Well, adaptation is often played out in daily life. We measure mood, smaller, everyday stresses, and physical symptoms as they occur in a person's everyday life. We have lab measures so we can provide an experimental induction of stress. We ask people to report on interpersonal stresses as well as we give them a physical stressor to see how well their body and their mind sort of recovers following the stressors, both physiologically through measures like blood pressure but also psychologically by looking at their positive and negative emotional responses. Okay, so for example, now we've just unpacked some of the data and we looked at subjective reports of neighborhood. Now here is a diagram of the analyses of their reports of neighborhood and in this case, we have two factors, neighborhood connectedness, which is like Putnam's measures of weak ties, but also neighborhood disorder, includes measures of fear of crime, physical mess, and social disconnection. The one point I want to make about this is every neighborhood can be defined by multiple indicators. These two major constructs, they are correlated negatively, but neighborhoods often will either be high in both, they could be low in both, or they can have one or and or the other. So it's important to look both at the strengths of a neighborhood, this is connectedness, but also its vulnerabilities, this sense of disorder. We've also done the same thing with our measures of social support. Now, this is a model of friend support, or lack thereof, social support, and these are the kinds of questions we ask, degree to which others, friends, they care for me, or they understand me, et cetera, but also negative social ties. They're critical of my behavior, they take advantage of me, they break promises of help. Now, they provoke feelings of conflict. The important point here is again, when we unpack relationships, in our study we do friends, family, work, but also spouse and significant other, is there are negatively correlated but separable constructs that define the positives and the negatives of everyday social life, just like in neighborhoods. And these are useful to study because one is not the opposite of the other, it's not a single dimension of influence in the life of people. Now, the question we ask ourselves in this study from a psychological point of view is how do we know when people are doing well? And in psychiatric epidemiology, for example, we'd be interested in distress and psychopathology and we do measure that. But in public health per se, we'd be interested in physical functioning. How well can the person continue to get up in the morning and get to work or to engage in activities that are meaningful to them? In the study of normal people, it's quality of life or degree of well-being that we're concerned with, and for resilience as outcomes, we think that all three of these dimensions are pretty fundamental. Now, when we model this with the data at hand from those 800 people, here's other constructs and they're built on measures from self-report. Psychological well-being, psychological distress and physical functioning. The correlations are fairly high, but still each construct is separable for the other, which means a person can be highly distressed, but they can still find a sense of vitality and making life purposeful and meaningful to them. A person can be low in physical functioning but still be psychologically equipped to have a good day. It's important to study these differential aspects of well-being, distress, and physical functioning, and this is the approach we're taking as we go forward. Now, you can imagine, we're relating these three constructs, well-being, distress, and physical functioning to our measures of neighborhood, both the demographic identification of neighborhood types, but also the self-reports of neighborhood disorder but also neighborhood connectedness. How do those relate to these outcomes and how do they provide the preservation of well-being and lowering distress and physical functioning in the face of major stressful events? Because actually when you think about resilience, it really ought to be always measured in response. It's fundamentally proven when the person can cope successfully, adapt well to the stressful experiences. So we use those stressors as sort of the medium by which we can display whether or not our measures of personality and social well-being and or social disorder determine the variables that matter in who ends up with a resilient profile and who doesn't. So what are the practical uses of big community studies like these? Well, here's some ideas anyway, but I think mostly the ideas come from what you might think is useful for many aspects of what I've talked about today. Social cohesion, for example, developed projects like the City of Phoenix is doing in community gardening that can foster weak ties in those communities that need them the most. We can identify which communities perhaps need them the most and which ones may be most open to those kinds of interventions building community from the ground up. We're currently involved in developing social intelligence training because we think relationships are really pretty fundamental. We're guessing, in fact, that those will prove to be the strongest predictors of well-being and physical functioning in our group. So we're building and testing a training program for those people in need, those in transition, for example, freshmen in college, retirees leaving the workforce and facing the social dislocation and organizations that rely on strong social ties like Fireman, for example. Informing volunteer programs, building mentoring programs between young and old is another example of how we can tie data about well-being and distress and resilient outcomes to programs that can help facilitate those outcomes in the future. Lastly, you name it, whatever you think might be most valuable. Thank you.


If you can attack things, I call it Alexander the Greated. He was 19 years old, began to take over the world, conquer the world, and by 30, he died at 31, the man had conquered the whole known world. And he did it by aggressively moving towards what he wanted. Stanford calls that the bias towards action. So when you got a choice, you got an email in front of you? Don't answer or answer? Answer it. Move the task back onto them. Think of it like hot potato. Hot potato. I don't want it to stick. Boom.