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. This is part two. For the first part, click here.

There’s also the implied assumption that if one has a college degree, they are smarter and more intelligent than someone without one; that the college graduate is more valuable as a person than someone who didn’t go to college. And even within this narrative, those with a STEM degree are deemed smarter and more intelligent than those with a Liberal Arts degree. I couldn’t disagree more. The smartest, wisest, most ingenious people that I know were not formally educated; they created meaning from their practical understandings and knowledge of the world around them. The Egyptians built pyramids without YouTube, MIT, and AI. 

I believe we are much smarter and much more capable without modern tools than we allow ourselves to believe. 

We’re so obsessed with knowing the next thing that we’re imprisoned by the fear and discomfort that arises from not being told exactly what to do next or where to go after. It’s a major contradiction. We spend so much time trying to figure out the best next move, the most sophisticated and rewarding next move, that we rarely move at all. Meanwhile, the “reckless” types are the ones who make things happen because they’re not restrained by the fear of the unknown, they embrace it and use it as fuel to jump to the next. It’s their “intellectual superiority of practice” that advances them advantageously through life (Taleb 109).

We’ve allowed ourselves to believe that we can’t look out for ourselves, that we need someone or something else to tell us where to go, what to do, and why we should do it. From what to eat for breakfast, which route to take to work, how many credit hours to take per semester, which career path to follow, which Caribbean island to spend a vacation, what hobbies to take up, what questions to ask on a first date, what pot to cook stew in, etc, and etc. Just take a damn chance and make a damn decision.  “The key is that the significant can only be revealed through practice” (Taleb 190). What will happen will happen, and you move on from there. 

I’ve even fallen into the trap believing that I need as many buyable credentials as possible to become a writer, believing that a natural hunger for knowledge and craft of information was not enough. But once I started doing rather than thinking about the “best” way to move forward with my career, I realized I had all the tools I needed: a motive of understanding and a drive for learning, that’s all it takes. 

The best way to learn is by living in the world, not in the washed-down, cherry-picked, safely-built versions of the world that exist around college campuses. If there is no challenge, no opposition, no drama, the story isn’t complete. Chaos is needed for the story to be complete. “We use randomness to spoon-feed us with discoveries – which is why antifragility is necessary”  (Taleb 188).

As a way to re-educate myself (deintellectualize as Taleb calls it), I’ve stopped assuming that I understand what is going on, that I can predict what will happen, or that I know because I’ve been told. Instead, I’ve begun to develop a better understanding of the world and a clearer way to articulate my new-found knowledge for I come to the understanding by means and methods true to my level of understanding of the world I live in. The better and more intimate my relationship with the world/environment, the clearer my understanding of what occurs within. Maxims and axioms rule, not complicated theorems and processes, and everything else flows from them. 

The key I believe is to live life with virtues, not rules; to be curious, not complacent; to understand by means of tacit, not explicitness; to desire towards erudition, not mastery of academia; to experience the world through skeptical empiricism, not theoretical rationalism; and to prefer manageable quality rather than an excess of irrelevant quantity (Taleb 23-27).

I fell victim to believing my work isn’t necessary because I couldn’t see how I could enhance or change the narrative of “what is bigger and better is right.” I discredited my abilities to enter and hold my own in the world of academia without the big fancy titles. But I feel more than capable and credible to be here discussing what I believe to be true and relevant. I have something to say, so I’m going to say it. I don’t need to be “right” and I don’t need to be the “best.” I want to be better than I was yesterday to change the precedent for what I can do tomorrow. It’s not about finding the “best” result, it’s about seeing the better option. 

The urge, hunger, lust for knowledge is a fleeting feeling now. With the ease of figuring out the answers to our questions, and the pleasure we feel from learning irrelevant facts to boast about around friends and family, erudition is leaving society. Knowledge nowadays is materialized to the degree that more is better. The incentive for application is lowering. People can know without having to do. They can instruct without having to feel. The depths of life have become taboo, less people want to take the risk. In the shallow pools, everything can be seen, planned for, accounted for; in the deep wild, the path only appears after the journey. 

With how much data we have in circulation today, the primary goal of science and academia should be, in my opinion, to reduce the noise. To reduce as many falsities as possible from the mainstream. To simplify the world to a state that we can begin to start understanding what it is we are actually doing. Instead, the two seem to be adding gas to the fire everyday. All of the community knows and sees the collapse coming, so when is someone going to make the call? Or is academia just going to keep adding until the entire structure collapses like a house of cards? And when that happens, what happens to you and I? What will be real, true, good? Will anyone take accountability? Will it incite a crowd of pseudo-skeptics to come forward preaching they saw it all along (but also never doing anything and benefiting from the raging fire)?

Time will always tell, and less is always more. The most accurate form of knowledge is reached via subtractive epistemology because you only need one instance to disprove a theory, whereas you need 100% probability to confirm a truth (Taleb 303). Knowledge isn’t static, there’s always something to disprove it.

So I will end this reflection aligned and in agreement with Taleb that “the best way to verify that you are alive is by checking if you like variations…results are meaningless without effort, joy without sadness, convictions without uncertainty, and an ethical life isn’t so when stripped of personal risks” (Taleb 423). 

I’m not sure what it is I’m searching for in each book I read, but there’s a hard-to-explain instinct that guides me to each new book and article. Pieces connect in ways I don’t expect, and gaps are filled with details I didn’t realize I was lacking. The world is coming into a clearer focus as I refine my knowledge on the subjects that come my way, and I’ve noticed a more intimate relationship with myself as a result as well. The more I learn, the less I need, and the easier it is to discern what is good for me and what is not. I’ve gained more gratitude for waking up each day because I see it now as an opportunity to deepen my connection with all that I love. 

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