Self-reliance in Everyday Life

Abstract

Self-reliance in Everyday Life 2.1 The Daily Challenge of Self-reliance Maintaining a healthy lifestyle, managing personal finances, finding and holding down a job-these are challenges that everyone faces. This chapter focuses on the following question: what mental capacities must an individual have to be able to meet these challenges? Health, personal finance and the job market are not the subject of this book, but they do illustrate the importance of having the right mental capacities to be selfreliant in our society. In this chapter we describe situations that apply to a relatively large number of people. While the chapter reports on research conducted in the Netherlands, the situations that it describes also occur in similar forms in other Western countries. We make an analytical distinction between the capacities needed to avoid problems (prevention) and the capacities needed to cope with problems (control). In real life, we see that some of these capacities are important in both situations, and that problems do not always have a clear starting point. This chapter is based on various sources. In each domain, we conducted a number of interviews with professionals and other stakeholders (more than 60 interviews in total, see Appendix I). We asked our interviewees what people must be able to do to be self-reliant and what typifies those who are good or bad at it. To provide solid underpinnings for the information obtained in our interviews, we draw on research conducted within the various domains. Because we aim to reflect on everyday experience in this chapter, we sometimes use the language of daily life. In addition to capacities, then, we also refer to health literacy, financial literacy, and job market skills. In the following sections, we review what is required of people in each domain and then discuss the role mental capacities play in each context.