Over many years, I’ve met a great many seniors. One man was paid 25 cents per day as a plowboy during the Great Depression. He was paid 50 cents per day during harvest season. Another man, Russel, flew 54 missions as a turret gunner in an A-20 Havoc bomber over Germany during World War II. His daughter has his flight book and impressed upon me that the bomber was hit on every mission her father flew — and that there is not a single exclamation point in his flight record.
There was also an Army nurse who was stationed in Italy during the war. I won’t begin to describe the horrific wounds, pain, and suffering she witnessed. Those are just a few of the seniors I’ve known. Just a note: Russel is still alive and is 103 years old. That would have made him 21 or 22 at the time of his missions.
In contrast, I recently read an article regarding a pilot program at the University of Michigan’s College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. The plan would have first-year, first-semester students receive pass or no-credit grades to help promote “a strong start and curb the mental health crisis unfolding among college-age individuals.” In fairness, moving away from a supportive family and into a new environment can be stressful. But the proposal raises a larger question: Are policies such as pass/no-credit truly compassionate, or do they risk reinforcing the very fragility they are intended to relieve?
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That conditioning begins long before college. Increasingly, we have sought to shield children from failure, disappointment, competition, and sometimes even the consequences of their own mistakes. The intention is humane. No parent wants to see a child suffer unnecessarily. But the humane response to difficulty is not necessarily to remove difficulty. Sometimes it is to help people discover that they can withstand it. A child who is never permitted to fail may also be denied the opportunity to discover that failure can be endured, learned from, and overcome.
Something broader has changed in the culture as well. Much of the popular culture I grew up with celebrated agency directed outward. Its heroes acted upon the world. They competed, built, fought, failed, trained, endured, and tried again. The question was often less “Who am I?” than “What am I capable of doing?” Think of the popular movies of the early 1980s: Rocky III, The Right Stuff, The Karate Kid, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Their characters certainly experienced fear, doubt, loss, and even trauma, but those internal struggles were commonly resolved through action.
Increasingly, the cultural emphasis has shifted toward identity examined inward. “Who am I?” “How do I feel?” “Where do I belong?” “How am I perceived?” These are legitimate human questions, and self-examination is an essential part of maturity. But social media has intensified the inward turn while paradoxically making it public. The self is not merely examined; it is continuously curated, presented, measured, and judged before an audience. The question “What must I do?” can gradually give way to “What is this doing to me?”
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) recently provided an unusually literal example when she publicly documented her decision to freeze her eggs, including giving herself a hormone injection while preparing for a television appearance. There is nothing objectionable about the decision itself, and she has said that sharing the experience may help other women better understand their reproductive options. But two phrases caught my eye: “I want you all to see that,” and “I think it’s bad ass.” Why do we need to see it? The issue is not whether an intimate medical decision should be discussed. There can be genuine value in removing ignorance or stigma. Rather, it is the transformation of an intimate experience into a performance in which the self becomes both the subject and the narrator: look at what I am doing, look at what I am experiencing, and look at what it says about me. Even vulnerability can become content, complete with an audience and, in this case, its own exclamation point.
Understanding distress and enduring distress are not opposites. A mature society should teach both. We have become considerably better at recognizing anxiety, trauma, emotional distress, and the importance of mental health. That is a genuine achievement. But in our understandable desire to protect young people from unnecessary suffering, we should ask whether we have become so accomplished at teaching them to understand their distress that we have become less willing to let them discover they can endure it. Does turning failure into no credit encourage students and parents to be honest with themselves? And if we remove the language of failure because failure is uncomfortable, what is the moral cost?
It’s been said many times: Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times. There is a fortitude in strength that is born of patience and humility. True grit is not an absence of fear, pain, or disappointment. It is the capacity to endure what cannot immediately be changed without making oneself the center of the experience.
The seniors I mentioned above all displayed this kind of character. It is not the shallow, momentary performance of the selfie or the carefully curated perfection of an Instagram post. It is quieter than that and asks for no audience. There is an old understanding of humility that captures it particularly well. St. Bonaventure wrote, “Be humble almost to excess, and let patience be the test of your humility, for humility is perfected by patience. Indeed, there is no humility without patience.”
Patience, then, is not merely adjacent to humility; it is the test by which humility becomes real rather than performative. Perhaps that is also the forgotten ingredient of true grit. Patience presupposes something we cannot immediately change. It requires remaining with difficulty long enough to discover that difficulty need not define us.
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Russel did not describe himself to me as courageous. His flight record apparently does not describe him that way either. Fifty-four missions, a bomber hit again and again, and not one exclamation point. When I asked him why he didn’t fly a 55th mission, his answer required no explanation of what those missions had done to him or what they revealed about who he was.
His answer was: “The war was over.”
Andrew Moore is a small-business owner and author of the Primus Aeternus series.