Antifragile

Hey, this is my account of what I experienced during two months in Chile after leaving behind my home country and family. I have no expectation of replies but am happy to receive comments and will happily answer questions. Letting go of old, embedded modes of thought and behavior is a painful experience. In a very real sense how we think and behave makes up a significant part of our identity, and so giving up a long held belief or a cherished way of doing things can feel like agreeing to fully conscious limb surgery: it might be necessary, but boy does it hurt. This is exactly what I have been experiencing over the past few weeks as a participant at the Exosphere Bootcamp. Throughout most of my adolescence I have been hesitant, if not afraid, to spontaneously express my feelings and thoughts for fear of being perceived as unintelligent or impulsive. Whenever I am in the company of people I respect I become overly careful and conscious of what I wish to say and how best to express it. I don’t want it to be this way. Conversations with good people should serve as a canvas upon which I may draw freely, giving shape to my innermost thoughts and feelings. And I’m slowly starting to get there. Where I previously would behave as if I were navigating a minefield, with the slightest misstep triggering a deadly explosion, I am now adopting a more relaxed attitude of experimentation, tinkering with topics to touch, exploring ways to modulate a conversation’s tempo and graceful ways of exiting it. I have started the long and painful, but ultimately invaluable, process of letting go of my fear of failure. I have chosen to set my sails after a newly born North Star and reorient the way I make consequential decisions. Facing the storm rocking my ship instead of navigating around the most minuscule clouds rewards me with the satisfaction of setting my own course, though it may be a difficult one. Life is just a series of problems. Reframing them as challenges puts the rudder firmly in my hands. Perhaps the greatest advantage of this new mindset is that I begin to see opportunities where before I would have seen only danger. So far I have initiated: The organisation of Exobase Hamburg Daily morning walks with a new friend Taking on branding, layout, visual design and user experience of the onFire application my team developed for the Coding Challenge Starting my personal website at moritzbierling.com A 21-day learning experiment by the name of Tinkering Tales Preliminary Logo Design Initiatives I have agreed to: Writing and editing profiles of all 31 participants of the current Exosphere Bootcamp Leaving my home country and starting a new life and my career in the strange country of Chile on the other side of the world Exercising my newly discovered and underdeveloped discipline muscle may be tiring but it is the good kind of exhaustion leading to greater strength down the road. At last I feel like I can safely begin to lower my shield, take off pieces of my armor, and stick my antennae out of the crusty shell I hid in. Hello? Can I come out? How I make decisions big and small has changed accordingly. The idea of “Tempo,” presented by Venkatesh Rao in the wonderful ebook by the same name, has helped me to trick my brain. It provides a very clever framework for overly analytical people like myself to overcome both overthinking (“analysis paralysis”) and compulsive planning that before would have prevented me from taking action. I now understand that everything we do is part of a narrative we tell ourselves. Having this insight leads to both good and scary consequences. Scary, because it challenges our carefully curated and scientifically constructed perception of truth, which is useful but ultimately yet another narrative. Good, because we begin to understand how much control we really have over how we construct our reality. Choosing to tinker with heuristics has been highly beneficial to my overall mental health. Unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and generally taxing situations still lead to agitation, but the anxiety associated with it is beginning to fade. Setting up a “just do it” attitude as the default approach helps me to conserve precious willpower which is put to much better use in deciding how to handle the bigger matters. Another resource I have come to appreciate more is my time. I believe this comes as a direct consequence of loving myself more. For the first time in my life I am surrounded by a community of great people intent on bettering themselves, their relationships, their skill sets, and ultimately helping others do the same. I’ve come to experience what true community feels like – sharing my story and listening to others share their stories has brought me to believe that I am not the only one who feels like a misfit or an outcast. Seeing the other participants courageously taking off their “I am okay” bandages, showing their wounds and caring for those of the people around them proves a point to me: healing is possible – but only if we are willing to commit to living a genuinely loving life. “Love is the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth… Love is as love does. Love is an act of will — namely, both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” M. Scott Peck It isn’t true love to keep telling your significant other “No, really. You don’t look fat in that dress!” When that is not your honest opinion you are trying to avoid conflict and the discomfort it brings. You are taking the easy way out. You are choosing not to do the painful, difficult, and mortifying struggle of working through the problem. Of course it takes time. Of course it takes effort. Of course you will feel exhausted. But you will go to bed with a sense of accomplishment. Fatigue on the other hand will keep you up at night. It results from having to expend significant mental effort on erecting and maintaining an obviously false narrative, forcing you to keep track of all the different versions of all the different little lies you tell to all the different people in your life. Honesty is simple, yet difficult. Lying is easy, yet complicated. I have found that telling the truth to people’s faces might lead to conflict and at times fundamental disagreements in the immediate circumstance. In the long run however it awards you two distinct great-to-haves: You can drop relationships from your life with people not willing to work through the pain with you. You gain respect not only from the people that survive contact with your newly unearthed authentic self, but more importantly you gain self-respect. Being honest with myself has given me a very good internal sense of self worth because I know exactly what I care about, what I can and cannot do, and what I will accept in my relationships going forward. “Honesty is the first virtue.” I feel a new faith developing in my self. A faith that whatever comes there will be a way to deal with it. A trust that, even if things turn out worse than my worst case scenario, I will be able to get back up, dust myself off, and start afresh. I feel like I am among kindred spirits.

Well, first of all: thank you for plowing through this rather long post. I basically just spew it out in the hope of somebody being willing and able to recognize it as a call for help. Your analysis has provided me with some stuff to chew on and to suggest. I cannot tell you right now how all of this fits together. I will however come back to you once I have done that. On an unrelated thought: is there a friends option on the board? With respect and gratitude, M

Dream I am standing in a single teachers room in school (in my school teachers didn't have single rooms, there was one big room for all of them) with the teacher whose features I cannot make out. There is another pupil in the room whose features I can't make out either, but I believe him to be a former classmate from school called Lennart. The three of us are standing like a triangle with the teacher and Lennart facing each other while I face through the gap between them towards the blackboard (in Germany it is green), which is at the other side of the room. Both the teacher and Lennart look at me with only their upper bodies slightly rotated into my direction. I am in this teachers room because I have to do a project for school and in the dream I believe I need to borrow a camera for it. In my minds eye I see the photo which is still to be taken: it shows my head and face and down until just the shoulder. It only shows the right shoulder, the left is not in the rectangle. The head is just a bit rotated, so it's not a perfect frontal photo. The photo slowly fades in my minds eye and becomes a drawn picture and then an oil painting. I ask the teacher, where the cameras are because I think that I have to have a photo taken of myself for the project. He replies by saying that the cameras are in another school in the area and that I have to borrow them from there. Featureless Lennart asks me, why I want to borrow a camera. He says, that I don't even need to take a photo and paint a painting, we only need to think of a look with the theme “Sumpf” (german for swamp) in mind. I see the word “Sumpf” written on the blackboard on the other side of the class. I look at myself and discover that I am suddenly in evening clothes: elegant black leather shoes, grey and close-fitting formal trousers, a beige or white baroque shirt with quillings along the button row, and a black jacket (the top part of a suit). In the dream I think, this appearance would suit me. After Lennart has told me about the project I feel a bit dumb for not knowing this and also a bit “huffy”, like he has insulted me. I want to leave and go through the gap between the teacher and Lennart towards the exit. Before I reach it I wake up. Me and my general situation I am the oldest (21) of four brothers (in total). For conveniences sake let us call them brother A to D with me being A, my youngest brother D (14). Brother C is about to turn 15 and Brother B is 18 years old. For half a year now I have been studying a bachelors degree in a business study program here in Germany and at the same time I am an employee at a tourism firm - this sort of program is called a dual study program: working and studying while getting paid for it (though not much). Before I started this program I was enrolled at another University in another city with the program “Philosophy & Economics,” which I canceled after one semester. After I did that I had half a year of “orienting” myself again and finding out what I want to do. I was also depressed as I felt I was a failure for canceling the program. I also had an extremely uncertain future which gave me great concern. It was in this phase that I discovered libertarianism and the philosophy of freedom. I had always LOVED philosophy, but felt it was a pastime and didn't take it as serious as now (in discussions with friends, family and in school I always was the devils advocate and knew how to extract principles and turn them against themselves). When I discovered the freedom philosophy it was as if for the first time I was anchored in reality. It made me feel like real truth was indeed possible. Over the following summer I delved into all I could find until I found Freedomain Radio and Stef by chance on iTunes. Ever since that day I have been hungrily devouring his podcasts in every free minute (travel to work/university, in lunch break, when I am alone etc) and in chronological order. I am now at 630. My immediate situation After I cancelled the P&E study program (it was in another city) I moved back into the flat of my family. Right now I share a room with my youngest brother, but have set my sights on moving out as soon as possible to put some space me and my parents and achieve some clarity concerning my relationship with and to them. I am looking for a flat together with brother B (18 years old). On the one hand this is because living together in a shared flat is just plain cheaper. On the other hand my brother and I are thinking about founding a company or start some kind of business. He too loves philosophy but is not yet as far and as clear in his moral and philosophical sentiments or thoughts as I am (that's what I think at least). My conflicts Our parents never hit us with regularity. It did happen though and every single one of us has been hit at least once by out parents. They themselves justify their actions by claiming, that in those situations everything went haywire and they did not know how to help themselves/ how to handle the situation - in other words: they felt overwhelmed. In a conversation about those incidents with both of them I said, that these incidents are something I think about regularly and that make me feel like they are a chasm in our relationship. These incidents are severe breaches of fundamental trust, especially when perpetrated against children. They themselves have said, that they never wanted to hit their children. My mother became aggressive as I talked about the hitting. I have explained to her that I might have some emotional or psychological problems/scars because of these incidents. She did not want to accept that even in the slightest in that particular moment (her brother has accused my grandmother of having pushed him to study law; my mother maintains that this idea is ridiculous - so indeed she has a bad template for dealing with accusations of responsibility and guilt). Still both my father and my mother agreed when I told them I wanted to go see a therapist/psychologist so that I can find out, which of my (emotional) reactions are justified and which might be exaggerated. Another conflict with my parents, though unadressed in our conversations, is that brother D is attending "confirmation classes". This is preparation for the ritual of spiritual adolescence in protestant faith. I myself have also attended these classes when I was younger, but never really believed in it. Shortly before quitting my last study program last year I also officially renounced my adherence to the church by deregistering for church taxes. I consider myself a strong atheist for the same reasons that Stef has brought forward (no evidence, contradictory concept). Obviously my stance doesn't fit with my brother going to church, but I have not talked about this with my parents, although (or because) the confirmation is in two months. The strangest thing about this issue is that my parents never go to church except for singing christmas songs on Christmas eve. My mother is religious in an extremely weak sense, meaning that Christian values or the bible have had no influence whatsoever on her decisions in everyday life. The only time thing she does in that direction is seeking consolation when somebody dies. My father doesn't even go to church on Christmas eve...