I slept like a baby on the night there was a strong earthquake. Perhaps my body was just too tired absorbing all the posts that flooded social media immediately after the tremor. And in the days that followed, the bayanihan spirit was unfolding again.
After months of regurgitating news about the flood control corruption, some quietly resigned to the familiarity of it, but everyone rose to the occasion. People were in the heroic phase — just wanting to help — creating a monstrous gridlock that stretched from Mandaue City to Bogo City, the ground zero.
Local government units from around the country sent their teams to assist in the rescue and response efforts. Politicians descended like gods staging their visitations to aftershock-weary, red-eyed residents. Volunteers posted selfies of themselves beside trucks distributing relief goods. And somewhere in the chaos, the inevitable message was clear, “We will rise again.”
It’s a comforting mantra for a nation polarized by political opinion, seeing ourselves helping ourselves. It’s a knee-jerk reaction, a national reflex. But what if constant rising becomes exhausting? What if the world’s most resilient people, as we see ourselves, are also the most tired?
For decades, we’ve worn “resilience” like a badge of honor. It defines our identity, from typhoons and floods to quakes and pandemics. We smile through pain, rebuild with bare hands and share what little we have. There is beauty in that endurance. But there is tragedy when resilience becomes an expectation instead of a choice.
When government lapses, we call it strength. When early warning systems fail, we call it faith. When unsafe buildings collapse, we call it destiny. In the Philippines, resilience has become our national favorite excuse. It turns neglect into narrative, failure into folklore. (There’s an interesting theory about that but that would be for another piece). The burden of recovery falls not on those with power and accountability, but on the vulnerable: the poor, the displaced, the women who hold families together in evacuation centers.
Yet resilience comes with hidden wounds. After every typhoon or earthquake, we count casualties but rarely the emotional aftershocks that follow. The cracks we don’t see are the ones inside people: insomnia, fear, depression. I’ve seen medical doctors in Tacloban City who were survivors of Yolanda pushed beyond exhaustion, comforting fellow survivors while confronting their own demons. These are quiet heroes, but even heroes burn out. Resilience without rest becomes cruelty disguised as courage.
And still, we glorify endurance. Like pornography, we consume suffering through endless headlines and viral videos, mesmerized and horrified all at once. “Resilience porn” is when media and public discourse romanticize survival while ignoring why people must keep surviving in the first place. It turns collective trauma into bite-sized inspiration, glorifies the individual struggle and lets institutions off the hook. We are the story of a nation that keeps rebuilding the same vulnerabilities and calling it hope. “Roofless but not hopeless,” I remember one banner displayed in Ormoc City after Yolanda.
True resilience isn’t about smiling through the rubble. It’s about demanding accountability from those who promised to protect us. It’s about stronger systems, safer homes, quicker response funds and a government that values prevention as much as praise. Until then, we will remain addicted to our own myth of strength, brave smiling faces on broken ground, mistaking endurance for progress.
In development circles, we talk about “bouncing back,” or its more polished cousin, “building back better.” But what does “better” really mean when people are forced to rebuild on the same fragile ground? I’ve seen it too many times: families reconstructing their homes, their lives and their livelihood in the same coast, using the same light materials, with the same weary acceptance. Not because they lack wisdom, but because they lack options. For many, “bouncing back” simply means returning to the same vulnerability that broke them in the first place. True resilience is not about bouncing back; it is about bouncing forward. It means learning, adapting and ensuring that the next quake hurts less because we fixed what was broken, not just rebuilt what collapsed.
Leadership, then, is not about posing for the camera amid ruins but preventing them. It’s about enforcing building codes even when unpopular and listening to scientists instead of silencing them. Good governance, not goodwill, saves lives.
We have risen many times before. Maybe the real courage now is to rest, rethink and rebuild a country that doesn’t need to rise so often.