ANTIFRAGILITY

Beyond mere robustness.

Dear reader,

It’s been a quiet few months. 

It’s not that I don’t want to post, nor is it that I have nothing left to say. 

It’s more that I started this newsletter with many presuppositions coming from a theoretical standpoint. The mind can imagine and invent and justify all manner of things, but the ultimate litmus test is if it can survive contact with Reality. In the words of a certain man…

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth."

I hadn’t yet tested these axioms on the field enough. And it came to be clear as day that ideas constructed in the relative comfort of a steady job with stable income are bound to suffer from the tunnel vision and epistemic myopia that haunts modern society. Certainly this is the basis of so many milquetoast ideas and foolosophies promoted by the Professional Managerial Class.

Therefore – Unacceptable.

So I reached a point where reading amounted to nothing, posting had served its purpose. I could no longer in good conscience write if I didn’t walk the talk sufficiently by my own standards. Enough talk, enough theory. It was time to put everything I’ve learned into practice. 

That story won’t be be written today, but enough people know about it. That’s all there is to say for now.

In short, I quit my job to create something of my own. It is unlikely that I will ever subject myself to formal employment ever again.

It has been about half a year now. What does that look like? It looks like:

• Half a year of lessons - some joyful, some annoying, some full of hurt.

• Half a year in the fire, letting it forge me, and

• Learning to master it, using its heat to temper the blade;

• Forging my ambition into something white hot and relentless;

• Humbling myself, day by day, week by week;

• Submitting to God and letting His Will guide me to where I must go;

• Being purged of weakness and excuses, sublimating, sublimating;

• Sinking deeper into the mystery of things, learning to be happy with not having all the answers, and

• Finding at the heart of life a holy wrath that purifies sin.

Working backwards and looking for first principles was only the first step, although it took years of study and cultivation. I spent a few years letting the words of men (now dead for hundreds or thousands of years) sink into my unconscious. Impossible to tell where their thoughts end and mine begin. Then the work began of building a coherent set – a system if you will – of principles and axioms to guide my life. But systems are just ideas, concepts, blueprints. They do nothing but collect dust if they remain theoretical.

A ship is safe in harbour, but that’s not what ships are built for.

I am happy to report that when the system came into contact with reality, it survived. 

People talk about post traumatic stress but little attention is paid – if any – to post traumatic growth. And over in this humble corner of the Internet, we believe enough ink has been spilled discussing the concept of post traumatic stress.

Not because it is a futile concept (on the contrary, it is verifiably real and thus exacts a terrible toll on many men and women), but because the conversations surrounding stressful or traumatic events tends to culminate in either prolonging the fragility, the vulnerability and fear, or more constructively in efforts to rebuild and restore the individual to the condition they were in before.

And that’s a key finding for this year: The masses are fragile by definition. Some are robust. They recover from life’s blows to the same condition before it hit them. The psychologists also call this resilience. But beyond robustness, beyond simple resilience, is there something else? Something that endures when struck but doesn’t break? Something that when grievously injured, as long as not completely ruined, not only regains its former health – but lo! becomes stronger and more driven and more exhilarated still?

The Levantine philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb certainly believes such a thing is not only possible, it is desirable that we do everything in power to become as such.

He calls this condition Antifragility; things that are antifragile gain from disorder.

The masses are frail and break.

Some rise above and are capable of rebuilding. Restoring a semblance of normalcy and functionality.

Even fewer are those who can withstand life, and grow stronger from stress and fracture. 

Can you hear it? The wind tells me that the next 10 years will be a crucible more painful and terrible than the last 3 years have been. I feel it in my bones now, it was a filter or some form of test. A great sortition has happened. And while I struggle to express this instinct in words I know which side I want to be on.

Don’t let up the pressure. Train everything. Become anti-fragile.

Keep fighting.