These are the thoughts that arose while reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. As the novel progressed, so did the flow and quality of my thoughts related to the topics discussed throughout. I’ve broken this post up into two parts to hopefully make it easier to read. Enjoy!

Antifragileness is the ability to opportunistically reinvent oneself after intentional exposure to periods of stress, discomfort, challenge, adversity, sparsity/scarcity, etc. By reflecting on what worked and didn’t, helped and hindered, changed and remained static, etc, an antifragile mindset will restructure accordingly with better tools and resources to better prepare oneself against the next wave of uncertainties. Just as a coastline never remains the same for it is always altered by the incoming waves, we must also be malleable to the effects of life without trying to control them. Coastlines will always remain, levees will always fail. Antifragileness is when “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better” (Taleb, 3).

Fragility is thus defined as “what does not like volatility does not like randomness, uncertainty, disorder, errors, stressors, …, harm, chaos, …, “unforeseen” consequences, and … time” (Taleb 12). Fragility “[depends] on things following the exact planned course, with as little deviation as possible – for deviations are more harmful than helpful” (Taleb 71).

A new age of fragile humans: people fragile to the complexities of being human. With the ever increasing openings and productions of products to soothe and ease whatever discomfort may appear (or enhance any good feelings), there’s less and less of an ability and motive to sit with, work through, and understand the full experience of being human. 

Because we’re outpacing our ability to understand the technologies we keep allowing to dictate our lives, we need more and more stability in as many areas as possible to feel like we are in control of said technologies; that we’re not allowing them to completely steal our agency.

We’re limiting and isolating ourselves from ourselves, thus fragile to anything that causes conflict or delay in ease and greatness. We’re happily cheating ourselves of the potential for greatness that builds when we embrace our whole selves instead of the ones deemed “right” and “preferable”. I see people criticize those who embrace broader spectrums of themselves while consuming the fruits of their creations (quirky artists, daring performers, strong-minded leaders).

I’d rather be an antifragile “clumsy” risk-taker than a fragile “sophisticated” rule-follower. 

Our obsessive need to have more and more (information and materialism) is linked to our increasing un-reliance on our own self-contentment. But we’re losing control and refuse to acknowledge it, so we lean in more and more into more and more technological comforts that do nothing but lock us into a fragile state of stability that, if disturbed even slightly, will set off alarms signaling us to lock down even harder onto what we believe to be true and right.

We hate hypocrisy but nearly every action we do is hypocritical to our “beliefs and virtues.” For example, I notice that many people value information, but not learning; they accept research about topics they have no experience in to validate a decision that yields the best result for themselves in isolated scenarios. 

The dream life/good life is advertised as a life free of stress, troubles, pain, and adversity. And this may be true, but the problem is that we feel entitled to such standards as we live in pursuit of these standards. We feel we deserve comfort and pleasure as we seek comfort and pleasure. This unrealistic standard is a root cause of why so many feel dissatisfied, impatient, frustrated, etc. Gratitude is lost and meaning is under-valued. And  “the media makes things worse as they play on our infatuation with anecdotes, our thirst for the sensational” (Taleb 89).

The dream/goal is to be rich and famous, not disciplined and hard-working; happy and pleased, not content and grateful; right and respected, not honest and humble; smart and dignified, not cultured and open-minded. 

Domain Dependence: This is one of my favorite concepts of the novel for I’ve always understood it and recognized it, but failed to give a name to this modern social phenomenon. With the world being more and more streamlined within explicit categories, knowledge and intelligence is highly dependent on those strict domains. So because it’s less translational across multiple domains, more and more information is synthesized and derived to fill these needs and cravings. And it’s not even just knowledge that’s affected. Even diets are treated the same. We over-rely on restaurants and companies to give us the nutrients we need for balanced health, when whole foods give adequate and proportionate nutrition.

Axioms and maxims of knowledge are too broad across too many domains today, so because of its inexactness, these golden-rules of thought are looked over for the loud and specific.

We know more than we think we know, but we don’t do what needs to be done in order to unlock those deeper understandings of ourselves. We accept without critique that we are pre-wired to a certain degree from generations of trial and error in genetics, and yet selectively forget the strength of our ancestors exist within us too. It’s hard to know the true extent to our capabilities when we never challenge ourselves past the points of discomfort. 

Another concept I loved is the idea of touristification. Touristification “is the systematic removal of uncertainty and randomness from things, trying to make matters highly predictable in their smallest details. All for the sake of comfort, convenience, and efficiency. Converting activities…into the equivalent of a script like those followed by actors.” [It] castrates systems and organisms that like uncertainty by sucking randomness out of them to the last drop – while providing them with the illusion of benefit” (Taleb 63). 

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We’re imprisoned by our insatiable need for comfort. A “golden jail.” Instead of trying to break out, we are working ourselves into a distressed pit of anguish trying to maximize the cell’s decor and amenities. 

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing – and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness” (Taleb 84).

If a boat is built to only sail in perfectly calm waters and weather, it doesn’t matter how luxurious the boat is or how skilled the captain is, the boat and all its passengers will be compromised with the first ebb and cloud. But building the boat with as many contingency plans and protocols as possible ensures optimal longevity and safety.

“We are moving into a phase of modernity marked by secularization (or rather reinvention of new sacred values like flags to replace alters), …, argumentative intellectuals, literal thinking, inductive inference, …, and egocentric architects…At the center of all of this is the denial of antifragility” (Taleb 108).

There’s a lot of work that’s done, constantly, to maintain the illusion of the “perfect modern society” because of how specialized and categorized it is. The majority of people are not acting in their best interests or with their natural instincts, it’s all a show. This causes stress and tension for always having to maintain a facade on the personal level to then enter into an environment that’s also set up like a movie set where everyone must play their parts accordingly so that everything can flow “how it’s supposed to,” so everything goes “according to plan.” 

I call bull. 

Too much of anything is bad for us, and yet that same maxim is shunned/disregarded when it comes to information. It is even socially believed that the more information the better. How can this be when even we know that most of what we consume on the internet (and even books) is false information? Because knowledge is so commoditized, knowing more information gives the illusion that one is more knowledgeable, but I’d agree with Taleb that “much of what other people know isn’t worth knowing” (Taleb 248). Quantity and quality will never be synonymous. 

Stressors are informatory signals about our relationship with what is happening in the moment and how we respond to it either benefits growth or extends comfort. So with this in mind, understanding is reached via the delivery and translation of information from stress. Therefore, stress is information, and Taleb makes a great connection where he states that “too much information would thus be too much stress” (Taleb 127). 

Our minds are not supposed to be bombarded by so much information, just as our bodies are not supposed to be compressed by too much weight. This is another example of a lack of translational intelligence; the theory holds true across multiple domains. 

Taleb also mentions the point that I haven’t even been aware of, which is the fact that there are less skeptics in modern society despite the ever growing technologies and flow of knowledge all around. We’re out pacing our ability to filter the information and products we create for potential dangerous falsities and errors. The shift from unconditional trust in religion, thus self, towards the unconditional trust in technology, thus the external corporations, is moving so fast that it’s literally incomprehensible. Taleb sums it all up by saying: “much of all of this is a religious belief in the unconditional power of organized science” (Taleb 229). 

“Wealth is the slave of a wise man, the master of a fool.” (Seneca). And since knowledge is a commoditized wealth, too much knowledge enslaves the wise man and rules the fools.

**Click here for part two**

Work Cited: Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.