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Writer's pictureCris

You can control nothing: life is chaos.


How often have we tried to plan every meeting, every workout, every outing? It seems that planning and controlling are the only solutions to keeping our lives under control.


Overplanning might work quite nicely ... until the unexpected happens: a train that is cancelled at the very last minute, a meeting that runs longer than usual, a bad knee injury. If, even with detailed planning, we are still so vulnerable, perhaps planning is not the key to survival.


Let's set that aside and talk about this object:

It's a double pendulum — a pendulum with another pendulum attached at its end.

Boring, isn't it?

It becomes less boring when we observe its behaviour. The image at the beginning of this post represents its trajectory. As we can see, it's not simple or linear; the double pendulum is one of the simplest systems whose motion is chaotic. In other words, minimal changes in its initial conditions produce chaotic behaviour.

It has a strong sensitivity to its initial conditions! 

Now, the question is: if even a system that small has such complex (and almost unpredictable) behaviour, how can we imagine taming our lives by planning everything?

If small changes in its initial conditions drastically alter its trajectory, how can we be so confident in our plans and goals?


That's where the term "antifragile" comes in. You cannot plan or control everything. Instead, you can adapt to the chaotic behaviour of life, face challenges and emerge better than before. You can be antifragile.

Yorumlar


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