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Even (maybe especially) extreme suffering can create resilience - I suspect it’s not optimal for happiness, but that’s not what this is about. This is about resilience.

A less resilient person may have a perfectly happy and content life doing things that aren’t as hard, that’s true of most people.

But someone who has something extreme happen to them will have a way higher fucking bar for bad. If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.


> If you lost your family in war the stress of a startup is nothing to you.

But respectfully this isn’t really how PTSD works. It seems intuitive to say this, but in reality, stressful situations will often trigger an exaggerated flight or fight response than is warranted due to changes in the brain’s structure, especially the hippocampus. Repeated, prolonged trauma makes the person even less resilient, not more so.

Not everybody develops PTSD, I think that’s the core point.
But not everyone develops PTSD precisely because they have innate resilience - at least that's how the theory goes. The resilience doesn't come from the trauma.

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