Originating from the critical mind of Nassim Taleb, professor and former hedge fund manager, anti-fragility is a concept which encompasses the idea that things need chaos and disorder in order to thrive and flourish .
It adheres to the timeworn truism that whatever doesn’t kill us makes us stronger , pushing the notion that we shouldn’t construct our lives or our plans against randomness and misfortune, rather, we should adopt anti-fragility as a means of maneuvering through disorder.
The concept can apply to anything — whether we’re raising our consciousness or raising our children, whether we’re investing or writing or learning. It can apply to the realms of politics, finance, technology, fashion or any particular industry out there, simply because it abides by one hard and fast rule: everything is susceptible to stress, change, and some kind of entropy or volatility .
It is easy to see things around us that like a measure of stressors and volatility: economic systems , your body, your nutrition (diabetes and many similar modern ailments seem to be associated with a lack of randomness in feeding and the absence of the stressor of occasional starvation), your psyche. There are even financial contracts that are antifragile: they are explicitly designed to benefit from market volatility. — N.T.
Nassim’s of the belief that we’ve come to over-fragilize everything — our economy, our politics, our education and our systems of health and well-being. That we’ve come to do this by suppressing randomness and disorder .
He’s not necessarily wrong.