Written for a blog I created titled ‘The Antifragile Male’ back in 2020. Much of that blog has been imported over to this website you are on now – BrandX Sept 2026
********
This website is still fairly new and evolving rapidly. It will cover a number of issues over time and speak for itself in doing so. But one major concept that I will integrate into many of my own blogs is that of antifragility. Hence the name of the blog/site.
Speaking subjectively; as an adult male, I have found that all the trauma, trials and tribulations that I have faced, no matter how dignified (or not) my actions and reactions were at the time, I have always emerged as stronger version of myself afterwards. Though I didn’t see that coming at the time in a lot of cases.
But that is my subjective take on this in a nutshell, which makes sense, because this is my blog. But let’s look at the concept of antifragility objectively.
The term/word ‘antifragile’ is credited largely to the popular author/philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb. So let’s explore that.
Taleb addressed the question “what is the opposite of a person or organization that is fragile?”. He argues that, although many would state “robust” or “resilient” as an answer, this isn’t quite accurate. Something fragile will break under stress, so to be the opposite of fragile, this certain something shouldn’t simply maintain its integrity when under stress; it should actually get stronger. Thus, he states he came up with ‘antifragility’ to describe this.
A simple example that I can think of would be our muscle fibers. When you lift weights, placing these under stress, you break these down. Hypertrophy occurs.
According to Menshealth.com: “Hypertrophy can be thought of as a thickening of muscle fibers, which occurs when the body has been stressed just the right amount to indicate that it must create larger, stronger muscles that can tolerate this new, increased load. This need causes a cellular response, leading to cells synthesizing more materials.”
But another example would be The Leap Study (see leapstudy.co.uk/). The clinical study ran trials investigating how to best prevent peanut allergies in children. The study found that early childhood exposure to peanut decreases the risk of developing such an allergy. They also found that this tolerance to peanut remains after one year of not eating peanuts.
One can attribute many of the trials, tribulations, woes and disasters faced by western society to the fierce adoption of fragility. Whether this is the global lockdowns of 2020, the campus insanity of ‘Safe-Space’ culture, MGTOW philosophy (which states that men should wholesale reject women and go it solo), or the rise in peanut allergies seemingly exposed by the Leap Study, mentioned earlier.
So I shall be using promotion of antifragility with this blog from time to time.
Even if a post seems to be ‘off topic’, there is usually some relevance. For example I just published a post about investing in men’s fragrances. This may seem random, but I get into the philosophy of it all and promote the idea of being yourself, being bold and not shying away from adversity. Someone may not like your preferred scent, so you’re afraid to wear what you want… but you overcome it. Congratulations, that stresser has now made you stronger as you survived it and now have something called courage. You are stronger. You were antifragile there, even if the victory here was fleeting, you still won.
And as Dom says in The Fast and The Furious…
There is a wealth of information on antifragility. The aforementioned Nassim Nicholas Taleb has himself written books on this, but you can also explore the concept further. So rather than rehashing it here, I’d suggest you maybe explore this yourself.
The following video would be a place to start:
Joseph, 25th January 2021