“Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same, the antifragile gets better.” ― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile
Life is full of funny paradoxes, the more you fail, the more you are likely to succeed. The more you try hard to impress people, the less likely they are to be impressed, the more you try to force people to stay with you, the more likely they will run away from you.
And more importantly, the more you are afraid of something (even death) the least you can enjoy life.
Risk is one of these things that everybody is trying to avoid without ever realizing that’s it’s a normal part of life that you can never run away from.
Risk should not be avoided, because in the end you can never really be totally safe, at least not on a hundred percent level.
A much better allocation of time and effort would be to face those risks at your own terms, to change their influence to a zone where the damage is minimal and their incidence on the outcome is as small as possible.
If you’re looking for a place where there is no uncertainty, then you have got to know that the price for that is composed by everything that makes life worth living: The randomness, the human connection, the serendipity, the love &pain...
Your dreams and your aspirations? You’d pretty much have to give them up too.
You become a shadow of your former ghost. You give up all your identity, all that makes you, you. Then, and only then you'll get to be a 100% safe from everything, because you'd have nothing left to lose.
But here's the crazy part, despite all logical explanations that uncertainty-free zone just happens to be one of the most sought after utopias the world has ever known.
The only place you can find that free-from-risk-life is in those empty promises that comes from the venomous lips of a preaching class who are always busy selling the oldest con in the world: Freedom in exchange for safety.
Give me bliss.
All along the course of history, that bliss has pushed people to do things so insane that they no science fiction writer could ever script, things that usually have no logical groundings of any sort.
It could be as dangerous as walking a virgin to the tip of a volcano, or it could be as harmless as making people drop to their knees and mumble some ancient incantations.
The reason why people keep falling for these traps century after century, it because they offer an irresistible commodity so precious and so shiny that it blinds your cognitive senses.
The bliss of certainty.
Somewhere, someone has all the answers, so just surrender your rights and you would never have to worry about anything anymore. It seems like a cheap price to pay, ain't it?
One thing is sure, is that we generally don’t access risk accurately. The times keep changing but we keep sacrificing everything for the same empty promise of safety delivered by someone who is always, always universally known as a pathological liar.
Here’s where it gets interesting, those errors in risk assessment are rarely a product of miss-calculations made from a rational standpoint.
What happens is that those preachers usually manage to exploit people’s fear and anger in order to dull their critical thinking and get people to act against their own self-interest.
The same is true at an individual level as well, not everyone responds to risk assessment in the same manner.
For instance all mothers (most mothers at least) want to protect their children and keep them safe. There are some however who cannot handle their own fears and take that over-protection to questionable extremes, always ending in up in their kids wanting to break free from their grip.
Always back-firing, always achieving the exact opposite of the desired outcome.
The same thing happens in relationships as well, some guys can’t handle their own fears and insecurities and so they project those unto their partners, and focus their energy in trying to limit the amount of risk or probability that their partner interacts with other members of the species.
“I know it’s ladies night, but why can't I just sit in the background to make sure that everything is okay?”
Needles to say, how you act in face of uncertainty is exactly what defines your outcome in one way or another.
Many people try with all their heart and soul to avoid all the risks that life to offer, while totally ignoring that one of the most important tools in human civilization was in fact the accident.
Some people start very early conditioning themselves to avoid dealing with uncertainty.
It may start from the first day of school listening to their teachers, and neighbors, and their co-workers… Until the day they’re too old and tired to do something about it, and then they wish they didn’t play it that safe.
They fall to what some people called a rat race, what others call a life trap. I don't know the whole list, but it's always a rat or a trap.
Sometimes it gets more interesting when you find other traps within the trap. Social pressure is a clear example of that.
“New blood joins this earth
And quickly he's subdued
Through constant pained disgrace
The young boy learns their rules
With time the child draws in
This whipping boy done wrong
Deprived of all his thoughts
The young man struggles on and on he's known
A vow unto his own
That never from this day
His will they'll take away-easy
…
He tries to please them all
This bitter man he is
Throughout his life the same
He's battled constantly
This fight he cannot win
A tired man they see no longer cares
The old man then prepares
To die regretfully
That old man here is me."
The Unforgiven , Metallica.
The truth is, you can run away from many things, but there is one thing you can’t run away from, that’s yourself.
But for now you can’t deal with that just yet, so you tell yourself that you'll deal with that “later”. What you do is seeking escapism, escapism in movies, in comics, in all sorts of fictional stories. It’s like you can’t stand one second with yourself without distractions.
But here’s the thing, if there’s someone you shouldn’t hide from, that's you.
But you chose distraction. You feel bored, binging Netflix isn’t gonna cut it anymore. Because deep down you know that something is missing. Maybe someone you will let down, something unconsciously bugs you though you can't put a finger on it yet.
But you better think fast, because if there is someone you should never let down is yourself.
You feel helpless, you can’t change your situation yet at the same time you are complacent, the comfort zone have eaten you alive but you don’t realize it yet, you get sick and tired of feeling sick and tired, and so you seek something that lifts your spirit and gives you some strength.
Something to help you fight back.
You search for a good movie to watch, hopefully one where the protagonist is relatable enough and happens to conquer a big struggle of some sort.
A metaphor for your own story so to speak.
There’s a reason why the hero’s struggle is the single most notorious story archetype known to man, and that’s because it responds to one of the deepest human needs.
In a way, life is like a movie. And you are the hero in this movie. You have a goal that you need to achieve, or a place you that you need to go to, but the road is full of obstacles, distractions and above all uncertainty.
Damn! everybody hates uncertainty.
In a way, you feel exactly like that hero at the bottom of that unclimbable mountain. And the most important question becomes:
Will you climb?
... To be continued.