matter. You could let your relationships deteriorate and fall away because,
after all, those people are going to be around forever—so why bother? You
could justify every indulgence, every diversion, with a simple “Well, it’s not
like it’s going to kill me,” and get on with it.
Death is psychologically necessary because it creates stakes in life. There
is something to lose. You don’t know what something is worth until you
experience the potential to lose it. You don’t know what you’re willing to
struggle for, what you’re willing to give up or sacrifice.
Pain is the currency of our values. Without the pain of loss (or potential
loss), it becomes impossible to determine the value of anything at all.
Pain is at the heart of all emotion. Negative emotions are caused by
experiencing pain. Positive emotions are caused by alleviating pain. When we
avoid pain and make ourselves more fragile, the result is our emotional
reactions will be wildly disproportional to the importance of the event. We
will flip our shit when our burger comes with too many leaves of lettuce. We
will brim with self-importance after watching a bullshit YouTube video telling
us how righteous we are. Life will become an ineffable roller coaster,
sweeping our hearts up and down as we scroll up and down on our
touchscreen.
The more antifragile we become, the more graceful our emotional
responses are, the more control we exercise over ourselves, and the more
principled our values. Antifragility is therefore synonymous with growth and
maturity. Life is one never-ending stream of pain, and to grow is not to find a
way to avoid that stream but, rather, to dive into it and successfully navigate
its depths.
The pursuit of happiness is, then, an avoidance of growth, an avoidance of
maturity, an avoidance of virtue. It is treating ourselves and our minds as a
means to some emotionally giddy end. It is sacrificing our consciousness for
feeling good. It’s giving up our dignity for more comfort.
The ancient philosophers knew this. Plato and Aristotle and the Stoics
spoke of a life not of happiness, but of character, developing the ability to
sustain pain and make the appropriate sacrifices—as that’s really what life
was in their time: one long, drawn-out sacrifice. The ancient virtues of
bravery, honesty, and humility are all different forms of practicing
antifragility: they are principles that gain from chaos and adversity.
It wasn’t until the Enlightenment, the age of science and technology and
the promise of never-ending economic growth, that thinkers and philosophers
conceived of the idea summed up by Thomas Jefferson as “the pursuit of
happiness.” As the Enlightenment thinkers saw science and wealth alleviate