The biggest problem with people is that they can't die on their own. I admit that's a dangerous thought. But one of society's big problems is that the 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 things that should die don't, the signals get polluted. The antifragile in Nassim Taleb's famous book 『안티프래질』 refers to a system that actually grows stronger when it takes a shock. Like muscle and bone1. For antifragility to work, a system needs these two properties:
- The part that receives stimulus grows.
- The part that doesn't receive stimulus disappears.
In a word: use it or lose it.
My view is that we should always live prepared to die, practicing for death. I don't mean we should actually carry out suicide in some solemn, dramatic way. This is not a piece encouraging suicide. What I mean is that when life isn't going the way I want, I should have the resolve to flip the table. Because if you don't decide for yourself, you get decided for. We should ask ourselves whether living according to someone else's intentions is really being alive. Even if we're biologically alive, are we alive in spirit?
Footnotes
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People usually think only of muscle growth, but bone also grows when stressed. This is called Wolff's Law (Wolff's law). ↩