We Need To Cultivate The Lost Art Of Antifragility
We’re living in a culture of fragility. Everywhere you look, people are treated like glass, bubble-wrapped away from any possibility of risk or offence. Students especially are taught that they’ll be shattered by different thoughts or opinions, and that they live in a patriarchal, tyrannical system designed to break them.
But humans aren’t fragile beings. In fact, history has shown us time and time again that the human race can withstand unimaginable adversity and even arise stronger out of its ashes. Contrary to what society leads us to believe, the human mind isn’t fragile — but profoundly “antifragile”.
What It Means To Be Antifragile
In his bestselling book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, scholar Nassim Taleb defines antifragile things as those that “not only gain from chaos, but need it in order to survive and flourish.” To be antifragile isn’t the same as just being resilient — “the resilient resists shock and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.”
The resilient resists shock and stays the same; the antifragile gets better and better.
A classic example of antifragility is the many-headed Greek mythological creature, the Hydra. If one head is cut off, two grow back in its place. For Taleb, the human mind is like the Hydra; it’s not just able to withstand hardship, but grows stronger after it.