The biggest problem with people is that they can't die on their own. I admit this is a dangerous thought. But one of society's big problems is that things that ought to die in due course don't. Think of failing companies kept alive by force, like cancer cells that refuse to die.
When the things that should die don't, the signals get polluted. In Nassim Taleb's famous book 안티프래질, antifragility describes a system that actually grows stronger when it is hit by a shock, like muscle and bone.1 For antifragility to work, a system needs two properties:
- The part that receives stress grows.
- The part that receives no stress disappears.
In a word: use it or lose it.
My view is that we should always live prepared to die, always practicing for it. I don't mean you should dramatically and grimly go through with suicide. This is not a piece that encourages suicide. What I mean is that if life isn't going the way you steer it, you should have the resolve to flip the table. Because if you don't commit yourself, you get committed by others. We should ask ourselves whether living according to someone else's intentions is really being alive. You may be biologically alive, but is that being alive in spirit?
Footnotes
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People usually think only of muscle growth, but bone also grows when it is stressed. This is called Wolff's law. ↩