Happiness is temporary, antifragility lasts forever, explains Jonathan Haidt and 5 other experts.

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What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. That old adage roughly sums up the idea of antifragility, a term coined by the statistician and writer Nassim Taleb. The term refers to how systems tend to become stronger after being exposed to stressors, shocks, and mistakes.

The same applies to humans. Although suffering for its own sake isn’t necessarily good, experiencing — and overcoming — stress and difficulty tends to make us stronger people in the long run. We shouldn’t always shy away from that which makes us uncomfortable.

0:00 Introduction
0:38 Jonathan Haidt defines antifragility
1:35 Susan David on life's fragility
2:12 Derren Brown on acceptance over positive thinking
3:02 Susan David on the risk of overvaluing happiness
4:39 Pete Holmes says "resist nothing"
6:42 Shaka Senghor on the ingredients for resiliency
9:45 Nancy Koehn on taking the first step

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/mind-brain/antif...

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About the experts:
Jonathan Haidt ► https://bigthink.com/people/jonathanh...
Susan David ► https://bigthink.com/people/susan-david/
Derren Brown ► https://bigthink.com/people/derrenbrown/
Pete Holmes ► https://bigthink.com/people/peteholmes/
Shaka Senghor ► https://bigthink.com/people/shaka-sen...
Nancy Koehn ► https://bigthink.com/people/nancykoehn/

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Read more of our stories on becoming antifragile:
Why you don’t deserve to be happy all the time
► https://bigthink.com/thinking/do-you-...
How to avoid “toxic positivity” and take the less direct route to happiness
► https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/avoid...
The Yerkes-Dodson law: This graph will change your relationship with stress
► https://bigthink.com/the-learning-cur...

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