Don’t chase happiness. Become antifragile by Tal Ben-Shahar

What is antifragile?

There is this misconception of a happy life is that one should always be happy. However, learning to embrace and accept painful emotions is part of a happy life.

Antifragile means putting pressure on a system and make it grow stronger and harder. For instance, we, humans, are antifragile. Think when we go to the gym and lift weights.

On a psychological level, it is called PGT (Post Traumatic Growth). The role of science of happiness is to teach us what conditions we can put in place to increase the likelihood of growing from hardship.

From research by Iris Moss and others, it can be seen that happiness is a good thing, however, valuing it is problematic. So, the way to be happy is to pursue it indirectly. Here is the SPIRE model:

• Spiritual: finding a sense of meaning in life, at work, at home.
• Physical: reduce stress, do more recovery.
• Intellectual: curious people tend to live longer and be happier. In addition, they’re deeply engaging with material (text, work of art, nature, etc).
• Relational: quality time with people we care and who care about us.
• Emotional: cultivate gratitude.

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

In reality, we cannot measure risk.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb used to work as an option trader, and option traders view the world in two dimensions: things that don’t like volatility and things that like volatility.

Here are some key takeaways from his talk:

• Anthing organic communicates with its environment via stressors.
• A system that works very well is a system that has layers.
  • For instance, the restaurant business works well because they are fragile.
  • However, in California (the epicenter of things), businesses strive because failure rates are converted into benefits for the system. → We should encourage entrepreneurs to fail, and remove the stigma.
  • The reason we are healthy is because there’re fragile cells in us that break first under stress. → You always have the top layer require the fragility of a lower layer.

References

Don’t chase happiness. Become antifragile | Tal Ben-Shahar | Big Think

Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder | Nassim Nicholas Taleb | Talks at Google