Antifragility: Growth from Harm

What unites things as seemingly unrelated as china plates & airlines, or natural selection & mental health?

[Adapted from my TEDxUVA talk delivered on Nov 8, 2020]

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Think about a cardboard box: sealed shut with packing tape, a UPS label on top… Sounds like an ordinary shipment, right?

But imagine turning the box on its side, and reading—in big, red lettering—the words “PLEASE MISHANDLE”. What on earth could possibly be inside? Please mishandle? Certainly not a china plate, or an antique vase.

Are there even things that benefit from mishandling? From shaking things up, adding a little chaos, maybe even breaking off one or two pieces?

Well, one example that might come to mind is evolution. Nature is always putting life forms to the test, eliminating the weakest within a population, and reproducing the rest—over time, driving the evolution of brand new limbs, organs, and brain functions.

And we see a similar effect in the business world, where disruptive technologies like the smartphone or the Internet force companies to compete, adapt, and innovate further, or be replaced by someone who can.

And in our own lives, we understand the paradox inherent to obsessive love, or false rumors: the harder you try to fight them, the stronger they grow.

So we know that there are things in this world that thrive in the face of stressors, shocks, or sources of harm. What unites these different things is a fundamental property known as antifragility.

The term “Antifragile” was coined by statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2012 book of the same name, which has influenced fields as diverse as biology, risk analysis, finance, and engineering. As touched on before, antifragility broadly refers to a system’s ability to gain from disorder. Something that is antifragile wants uncertainty, stressors, failures, the passage of time itself and the variability that comes with it. 

Now this is clearly the stark opposite of fragility, which describes things that are harmed by those very forces. A delicate plate wants nothing more than to sit still, undisturbed in your cupboard, because anything else raises its chances of fracture.

But, antifragility is also distinct from robustness, which is the ability to withstand disorder. As Taleb writes, “the fragile wants tranquility, the antifragile grows from disorder, and the robust doesn’t care too much”. Together, these terms form a spectrum of fragility. In the same way you can measure the temperature of foods, you can measure the fragility of a system.

Now you’re probably wondering: why does this even matter? The answer is that fragility is an extremely consequential lens by which to view nearly any subject. 

Let’s take coronavirus, for example. According to Bloomberg, over the past decade, the biggest US airlines have put nearly 96% of their cash flow into stock buybacks, increasing the wealth of investors and top executives by tens of billions of dollars— money that could’ve been saved to prepare for a downturn. That’s already a questionable way to run any company, but especially one that is entirely dependent on continual, intercontinental demand for travel! 

(Bloomberg, 2020)

Note that there’s a huge asymmetry here. It’s hard to think of random events that can double the number of people buying plane tickets. But when it comes to events that can drop that number to zero, there is an easy one! Viral contagions have been a fixture of human civilization for millenia, and have only become more frequent with globalization. 

By depending on an uninterrupted flow of customers, with such little margin for error in their balance sheets, airlines “fragilized” themselves, becoming—like a plate—prone to shatter in the rough-and-tumble of our chaotic world. And that’s exactly what was set to happen in March, when coronavirus swept the country, before taxpayers saved the industry from bankruptcy.

So that’s an example of a fragile system. What does an antifragile one look like? For that we turn to nature. The truth is that most man-made creations are fragile, because we lock in our models, our predictions, our base assumptions—in short, dependencies. But nature takes a different approach, relying not on dependency, but rather, redundancy.

Man-made systems tend to hinge on certain key dependencies. Hence, small failures have cascading effects.

Consider that we have two kidneys but need just one for survival; our bodies expend the effort to support an extra organ just to hedge against the chance of kidney disease. Like insurance, it gives us a little robustness to failure. But under certain conditions, redundancy (the presence of multiple units of something) can form systems that don’t just withstand failure, but grow from it.

Nature engages in redundancy, putting its eggs in many, many baskets. Small failures have little effect on the whole system.

Think about how weight training works: we deliberately strain our muscle tissue, causing the weakest fibers to tear. Individually, each muscle fiber is fragile to stress. But our body responds by rebuilding these fibers to be tougher, and growing even more of them. Taken as a whole, muscles are antifragile to stress.

Evolution works the same way. Within a population, each individual organism is highly fragile to its environment; for a moose, a single encounter with a wolf can mean the difference between life and death. But by filtering out the slower and weaker members of the moose population, natural selection drives the growth of stronger legs, and bigger antlers with which to fend off predators. The base unit—the individual— breaks from evolutionary pressure, so that the group can gain from it. 

But what about much bigger types of pressure? We know that species too can be wiped out by major environmental stress, a well-known example being the extinction of the dinosaurs (triggered by an asteroid). But look at the survivors of the event: avians able to scavenge for seeds, aquatic creatures lurking deep in the oceans, and small mammals able to burrow underground. The mammals especially thrived, growing larger, more complex, and more diverse, ultimately paving the way for the rise of humans, the most intelligent lifeform to ever walk this earth. Looking at species as units reveals that each one is fragile to some types of events. But put all together, this makes for a system—biological life as a whole—that is highly antifragile. 

To summarize, anything, on its own, has some degree of fragility. But agglomerating multiple fragile units together can make for a very antifragile whole. Cells and tissues are damaged from physical strain, allowing organisms to toughen from it. Organisms die from being hunted by predators, advancing the species over time. And species perish from cataclysmic events, pushing ecosystems to evolve in new, creative ways.

Now, I said earlier that antifragility is a highly practical way to analyze systems. One area where this is the case is public policy, where we can use antifragility to design better systems.

A competitive, free market economy operates a lot like ecology: individual firms compete against each other aggressively, which keeps their broader industry in shape. And industries stuck in the past are wiped out by new ways of thinking and doing, forcing the overall economy to evolve. As before, fragile parts assemble into an antifragile whole.

Restaurants are highly competitive and prone to failure, making for a dynamic and customer-obsessed industry.

But what happens when instead of exposing these parts to failure, we shield them from it? Let’s return to the airlines example. We saw that failing to hedge against any shock to demand made many airline companies extremely fragile to public health crises—in this case, the coronavirus. But by bailing out those same companies, Congress has turned that fragility into robustness: the airlines have very little to fear about the next pandemic, and the next one. So because of the way we craft public policy, we should expect them to continue plowing nearly all their profits into stock buybacks—and then ask us for another bailout the next time this happens. 

Bailout recipients lose the dynamism of competitive markets; they have little fear of failure (aka “skin in the game”)

So this is a clear-cut case where looking at fragility can point out flaws in our policies, and hopefully, help guide us toward better ones. But the second, and in my opinion, more important, application of antifragility is in our personal lives. 

Randomness, stressors, harm, and failure are not some distant, academic concepts, but something we experience every day. Speaking personally, college has brought me the biggest setbacks I’ve ever faced in life: the loss of key relationships and friendships, the struggles to find new ones, and the resulting impacts on my mental health and self-esteem. Impacts that I feel every day, including while writing the essay you’re reading right now. And things have only gotten harder with the pandemic and social distancing. At times, this past year has just felt cold, totally unfair, even cruel. I know many of you can relate in some way.

But humans are not china plates. The thing that sets us apart from anything else on this planet is our ability to control how we respond to harm—whether to break from it, or grow from it. My college experience has been extremely challenging, but I’ve realized that there are certain parts of me that should be challenged. 

Old habits—like seeking validation from social media, and refusing to admit when I need help—do have to break, so that new habits can replace them; like spending time journaling or exercising, and opening up to close friends and family even when it's hard.

Weaknesses in my character—like letting emotions sometimes cloud my judgement, or placing blame on others—do have to go, so that character strengths can grow in their place: being level headed when making decisions, and accepting responsibility for them.

In the exact same way that weak fibers are broken and strong ones are born, so that our muscles can grow. 

Antifragility is not just a framework for academia, but a mindset for ourselves. Don’t get me wrong—it’s by no means an easy attitude to embrace at all times. But if there’s one thing that I want you to take away from my essay today, it’s that easy won’t do for you what hard can do for you—if you’re willing to be antifragile. If you’re willing to be broken down at times, so that you can build yourself up better than before. To accept short-term setbacks, so that you can experience long-term gains. To wear the words “Please Mishandle” like a badge, knowing that you are ready for whatever the world throws at you.