Stress as information:
Depriving stress-hungry antifragile systems of stressors brings a great deal of fragility.
As Naval tweets, “Knowledge workers function like athletes - train and sprint, then rest and reassess.”
Central to this concept is the fact that, humans do better with acute short term intense pain followed by a period of recovery as opposed to long term shallow pain and deprived of recovery period.
To put it in perspective, in the Chinese water torture technique, a drop of water is continuously allowed to fall on the head of restrained captive, at the same spot, which eventually drives the person insane.
Organic systems:
Organo-antifragile systems tend to exhibit or rather demand these kind of inputs from the environment.
- Love small doses of randomness
- Want for recovery periods post stressful events
- Highly emergent system behaviour
- Atrophy with disuse
Love for chance:
‘Inspiration is Perishable’ -David Hansson
Ever wondered why is this agenda always pushed to stick to plans, not stating that it has averse effects, moderation is the key here.
Enter chance, how wonderful it would feel to know if one were to go for a month trip to Hawaii, as compared to doing the same routine, sucked out of the thrill of something uncertain to happen.
How resilient would a system be, which knows not what may come and overcompensate it’s attributes, create a rush of adrenaline hit and wave over the obstacles.
Take cycling for example on a hilly terrain, with pebbles of vibrant non-uniformity, the freedom of flight one feels over the unexplainable trade-off between control and letting go is joyless, compare that with cycling within the confines of the hum-drumness of the gym.
Go ahead and give it a thought.
‘Much of modern life is preventable chronic stress injury.’ - Nassim Taleb