The biggest problem with human beings is that we can't kill ourselves. I admit this is a dangerous thought. But one of society's great problems is that things which ought to die properly don't. Things like failing companies kept alive by force. Just like cancer cells that refuse to die.
When things that should die don't, the signal gets polluted. Antifragility, the concept put forward in Nassim Taleb's famous book 안티프래질, refers to a system that actually grows stronger when it takes a hit. Like muscle and bone1. For antifragility to work, a system has to have these two properties.
- The parts that get stimulated grow.
- The parts that don't get stimulated disappear.
In a word: use it or lose it.
My view is that you should live always prepared to die, always practicing dying. I don't mean you should actually go through with suicide in some solemn, dramatic fashion. This isn't a piece encouraging suicide. What I mean is that you need the resolve to flip the whole board over if life stops going the way you want it to. Because if you don't decide for yourself, you'll be decided for. It's worth asking whether living according to someone else's intentions is really living at all. You may be biologically alive, but is that being alive in spirit?
Below is a hangman's knot. If you always carried a cyanide capsule on you, maybe you could live more in the direction you actually want.
Footnotes
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People usually think only about muscle growth, but bone grows when stimulated too. This is called 울프의 법칙. ↩