gets stronger the more stress and strain you put on it. The breaking down of
your body through exercise and physical labor builds muscle and bone
density, improves circulation, and gives you a really nice butt. But if you
avoid stress and pain (i.e., if you sit on your damn couch all day watching
Netflix), your muscles will atrophy, your bones will become brittle, and you
will degenerate into weakness.
The human mind operates on the same principle. It can be fragile or
antifragile depending on how you use it. When struck by chaos and disorder,
our minds set to work making sense of it all, deducing principles and
constructing mental models, predicting future events and evaluating the past.
This is called “learning,” and it makes us better; it allows us to gain from
failure and disorder.
But when we avoid pain, when we avoid stress and chaos and tragedy and
disorder, we become fragile. Our tolerance for day-to-day setbacks
diminishes, and our life must shrink accordingly for us to engage only in the
little bit of the world we can handle at one time.
Because pain is the universal constant. No matter how “good” or “bad”
your life gets, the pain will be there. And it will eventually feel manageable.
The question then, the only question, is: Will you engage it? Will you engage
your pain or avoid your pain? Will you choose fragility or antifragility?
Everything you do, everything you are, everything you care about is a
reflection of this choice: your relationships, your health, your results at work,
your emotional stability, your integrity, your engagement with your
community, the breadth of your life experiences, the depth of your self-
confidence and courage, your ability to respect and trust and forgive and
appreciate and listen and learn and have compassion.
If any of these things is fragile in your life, it is because you have chosen
to avoid the pain. You have chosen childish values of chasing simple
pleasures, desire, and self-satisfaction.
Our tolerance for pain, as a culture, is diminishing rapidly. And not only is
this diminishment failing to bring us more happiness, but it’s generating
greater amounts of emotional fragility, which is why everything appears to be
so fucked.
Which brings me back to Thich Quang Duc setting himself on fire and then
just sitting there like a boss. Most modern Westerners know of meditation as a
relaxation technique. You put on some yoga pants and sit in a warm, cushy
room for ten minutes and close your eyes and listen to some soothing voice
on your phone telling you that you’re okay, everything’s okay, everything’s
going to be fucking great, just follow your heart, blah, blah, blah.^25