Psychological Antifragility: How to Thrive in the Face of Adversity
Is there a way to pursue personal antifragility in our daily lives?
First published on Thinking Ahead.
Post-traumatic growth
The idea of antifragility was launched into public consciousness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book Antifragile. The subtitle says it all: Things that gain from disorder. What better way to explain it than let Taleb do it himself:
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.
This concept has since been explored in many fields of science. Economics, molecular biology, physics, you name it.
What about our human selves? Let’s get a bit anthropocentric; we’re only human after all. In a physical way, think of muscles. They grow stronger when subjected to stress from exercise. If they function well, they’re not just resilient (aka they can bear the…
