Humans are evolved to be antifragile: We grow stronger with exposure to manageable risks, with the pushing of boundaries, fostering openness to serendipity and to that which we do not yet know. This is true for both bones and brains. Doing things with nonnegotiable outcomes in the physical world—skateboarding, growing vegetables, ascending a peak—provides a corrective to many wrongheaded ideas currently passing for sophisticated. Some of these include: all of reality is a social construct, emotional pain is equivalent to physical pain, and life is or can be made perfectly safe.
