Antifragility 101
or why I'm no longer obsessed with motorcycles
In the summer of 2020 I got obsessed with motorcycles. I watched endless videos on YouTube and eventually put in an order with a local dealership. On the 4th of July I got tired of waiting for the dealership’s shipment to arrive, found a listing on Craigslist, met some guy in a grocery store parking lot, and bought a 2018 Honda Ruckus with some 2300 miles on it. I rode it to the Virginia mountains and back, lost my lifelong fear of driving, and found my new form of meditation. I rode it to the beach and back. I rode it 240 miles to Fredericksburg Virginia in one day to take a dirt bike class, then a couple days later I rode it 240 miles back, at full throttle nearly from dawn to dusk. Then I spent the winter fixing up a 50-year-old Honda CT-90 and in the spring of 2021 I rode it around the country. I wrote a massive blog about the whole adventure. But somewhere between New Mexico and Texas, the shine wore off like the tread on my back tire. I still enjoyed riding, but I noticed myself counting the miles more, and fantasizing about walking, and about riding on buses, trains, boats, and planes. When I got a chance to watch my favorite motorcyclists on YouTube, their adventures felt almost as boring as crossing the windswept plains of West Texas. I thought about it a lot, but couldn’t seem to figure out where my enthusiasm went.
Maybe it had something to do with how easily my antique motorcycle could break down and strand me somewhere, although thinking about getting a brand new one didn’t change how I felt. I was also getting tired of the constant exposure to roads, cars, and the occasional homicidal driver passing me too fast and running oncoming cars off the road. Maybe it was somewhere in that neighborhood. Then I remembered reading a review of Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, decided to buy the book, and as soon as I started reading it, my thinking just fell into place. There’s a lot of ideas in that book (which I’ll likely talk more about in future), but the central concept is that fragile things are damaged by chaos, robust things are indifferent to it, and antifragile things are helped by it. We talk about the spectrum from fragile to robust, but Taleb was the first to give a name to the flip side of it from robust to antifragile. The book has a big list of what falls into each category. I found a lot of the things I liked in the robust column, and a lot of the things I loved in the antifragile column. All of a sudden I had an underpinning for what had before seemed like very personal aesthetic preferences.
So for example a motorcycle is fragile, because every piston stroke and bump it rides over takes it closer to the junkyard. Sure, a Honda is more robust than most motorcycles, but there’s a limit. On the other hand, I’m antifragile, because the more I walk, the stronger I get. I can lend some of my antifragility to the motorcycle by changing the oil, cleaning and replacing the chain, adjusting the carburetor, and so on, but in the end it’s a losing battle, and is that really what I want to sink my limited life force into? Apparently not, because it no longer tugs on my heart. I feel called to the self-healing complexity of the living world. I long to go back to the days when walking was a natural part of my lifestyle and not something I had to make an effort to do. If I ever “break down” while walking, sitting still for a few days is likely to get me moving again without having to find a mailing address and order specialized parts from eBay. When I got back home for Christmas I parked my motorcycle in my friend Ray’s garage, fully intending to go back and try to fix some minor engine problems, but I never did. I was having too much fun figuring out how to fit everything I needed to camp and work into the overhead bin of an airplane.