Some things benefit from shocks, they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder and stressors and love adventure risk and uncertainty. Why?
Modern culture has been increasingly building blindness to the mysterious the impenetrable, what Neitzche called The Dionysian in life. To translate Neitzche or Cato the elder into less poetic but no less insightful Brooklyn vernacular, this is what we call “Sucker Game”.
Likewise, with randomness, uncertainty, and chaos, we want to use them ALL ! not hide from them. We want to be the fire and wish for the wind. To survive uncertainty is for small kids, barely making it – we want to be as aggressive Roman stoics, survive and have the last word. The mission is how to domesticate, even dominate, even conquer, the unseen, the opaque and the inexplicable. HOW?
In a Roman recycled version of Greek myth, the Sicilian tyrant Dionysius II has the fawning courtier Damocles enjoy the luxury of a fancy banquet but with a sword hanging over his head, tied to the ceiling with a single hair from a horse’s tail. A horse hair is the kind of thing that eventually breaks under pressure, followed by a scene of blood, high-pitched screams, and the equivalent of ancient ambulances.
Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same, the antifragile gets better! We do not even have a word in our vocabulary to describe this phenomenon in our dynamic and complex worlds – yet intuitively and instinctively it is evident as the human body organ is antifragile itself.
The antifragile loves randomness and uncertainty – a love of errors, a certain class of errors. Antifragility has a singular property allowing us to deal with the unknown, to do things without understanding them, and to do them well.
We can see the things around us that are like a measure of stressors and volatility, economic systems, financial contracts, our body, our nutrition, and our psyche. Just as we cannot improve health without reducing diseases, or increase wealth without first decreasing losses, antifragility and fragility are degrees on a spectrum,
In short, the frugalista ( medical, economic, social) is one who makes you engage in policies and actions, all artificial, in which the benefits are small and visible, and the side effects potentially severe and invisible.
Inspired by Antifragile