How To Become Antifragile

In one of the most beautiful passages in A Farewell to Arms, Hemingway writes about how cruel and harsh the world is, and how, eventually, it breaks everyone. “Afterward,” he says, “many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills.”

Let’s be clear about what Stoicism is. In simple terms, it is a philosophy designed to make you stronger, so that you don’t break easily. It is not, however, a philosophy to make you unbreakable—at least not in the most easily understandable sense of that word—because only the proud and the stupid think that is even possible. Instead, Stoicism is there to help you recover when the world breaks you and, in the recovering, to make you stronger at a much, much deeper level as a result.

So much of what happens is out of our control: We lose people we love. We are financially ruined by someone we trusted. We put ourselves out there, put every bit of our effort into something, and are crushed when it fails. We are drafted to fight in wars, to bear huge tax or familial burdens. We are passed over for the thing we wanted so badly. This can knock us down and hurt us. Yes.

But then the Stoic heals themselves by focusing on what they can control: Their response. The repairing. The learning of the lessons. Preparing for the future. It is in this that we become, as Nassim Taleb has said in his wonderful book by the same name, antifragile. We become better for what we went through, better than if we had resisted and never been broken in the first place.

It is in this approach that true strength lays. Because those that cannot break, cannot learn and cannot be made stronger for what happened. Those that will not break are the ones who the world kills.