A N T I F R A G I L I T Y
I want to share a concept I've been really keen on lately as I navigate some of the more turbulent waters out in the world. I’ve found it helpful as something to calibrate my compass to in an ever-increasingly uncertain and intensifying landscape. It was coined by Nassim Taleb as such:
“Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. . . .
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty, which also means— crucially—a love of errors...”
Here are some examples that exhibit these qualities:
• Fragile = the slightest stress breaks it.
Ex. a porcelain tea cup, someone who breaks down into victim mode under criticism, or a career that could be easily ruined by a smear campaign or cancel culture.
• Robust/Resilient = stressors don’t impact it, it can withstand many blows, and is indestructible.
Ex. An anvil, or a Phoenix (every time it gets “killed” it comes back the same)
• Antifragile = stressors make the thing better. All negative impacts on it actually work to improve the thing's strength/intelligence/clarity. Antifragile ppl are attracted to chaos and discord because they thrive and get better there.
Ex. a lump of coal under pressure becomes a diamond. The mythological creature the Hydra (pictured below) is antifragile - when you cut one head off, two grow back in its place and it’s strength and power only increases.
On how each type interacts with mistakes:
• Fragile people hate mistakes and are really disregulated or even destroyed by them.
• Resilient people neither love nor hate mistakes. Their skin gets thicker with each new failure and they can become callous in the face of error.
• Antifragile people welcome a mistake with open and humble arms and see it as a minor event that helps them get better. They pivot toward mistakes instead of cowering in anticipation of them. Antifragile people know mistakes are vitally important pieces of feedback on the path toward mastery that only add, not take away. Their ego is not linked with a sense of linear success, they know the path is more spiraling and will involve taking steps back occasionally in order to progress forward.
Taleb says that you can't always be antifragile, but you can at least be robust and minimize your fragility. He uses this term to refer to different systems in society, but I am applying it more so in a psychospiritual sense for my personal journey. Doing trauma healing and shadow work are ways to minimize fragility (and trigger-ability) and increase robustness and antifragility so that we can navigate the terrain more effectively with fewer trip-ups.