Antifragility

Sermon: February 22, 2026 . Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of San Dieguito

I love to garden. It is the spiritual practice that reminds me that I can heal. When the world is bleak and I’m faced with upsetting news, I go into my garden and watch the plants grow. Regardless of what is happening in the world, my plants continue to reach toward the light. They don’t give up. I have been known to take a particular plant into my care and nurture it as though it were a piece of my own soul. If this ivy plant can keep growing despite harsh conditions, then so can I. Nature knows how to heal itself. 

My favorite plant is the tomato vine because of its staunch resilience. Many people don’t understand how hearty tomato plants are. When you purchase one from the garden store, you are often encouraged to also purchase a cage for it to grow in so that it has the proper support for the branches that will bear the weight of its heavy fruit. If you don’t have a cage for it, its branches will flop down to the ground. It’s not a climbing vine with tendrils that reach out to grab hold of nearby plant friends for support. It droops and drops, which can frustrate gardeners intent on perfect fruit. But here’s something many people don’t know about the tomato plant, it’s supposed to droop and drop. It’s brilliance lies in the fact that it is designed to bend and fall as the vine becomes too heavy on its upward climb toward the sun. It is then, when the wind or gravity has taken the vine down and the it lays sideways in the dirt, that it sprouts new roots, creates new systems for support, and gains strength. 

This is such a well known fact for tomato farmers that one of their farming practices is to wait until the seedlings are about 18 inches high and then push them right over. They literally go down the rows they’re planted and push each plant down to the ground so that it’s lying on its side. Momentarily damaging the plant in this way actually ensures that it will grow more roots and thus bear more fruit in the long run. Due to lack of space in my own garden, I have taken to stripping tomato vines from all its lower leaves when I bring it home from the store, then I bury the entire bottom half of the vine in the ground. Each spot that once grew a leaf will now sprout roots and when those roots take hold, the plant will grow faster, larger, and stronger. 

The concept of being more than resilient, of not just bouncing back, but actually growing beyond what you once were, before any harm or discomfort, is the concept of antifragility. The classic example of something antifragile is Hydra, the Greek mythological creature that has numerous heads. When one was cut off, two grew back in its place. Nature is filled with examples of antifragility and as part of nature, we are no different.

Our bodies are meant to be antifragile. To build muscles, we must actually tear the fiber strands so that they repair and grow stronger. Our immune systems are more robust the more they are exposed to viruses and stressors. Guitarists and other string players know that skin becomes thicker in places that are subjected to continual use or friction. Our bodies include many systems that require challenge in order to develop. So what about our minds? How do our brains handle stressors and what happens when they aren’t exposed to them?

Nassim Taleb’s book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder dives deep into the reality of how our society, culture, and individual mental health has been affected by this trend toward avoiding antifragility. He says, “we have been fragilizing the economy, our health, political life, education, almost everything… by suppressing randomness and stressors.” When it comes to our mental health, we also need mistakes from which we can learn. We need gradual exposure, variation, and error. In clinical psychology, the concept of stress inoculation theory explains that we need repeated, tolerable stress in digestible doses in order to increase our neural plasticity and develop what we call cognitive flexibility. In other words, our brains need to practice bending. We need to gain the ability to shift perspectives, unlearn assumptions, and become adaptive with our strategies… and this takes practice. 

My children were small when the US once again realized that we were falling behind other countries in the education of our children, particularly in the subject of math. A new kind of math was developed called “Common Core” and it quickly became absolutely despised by parents. They didn’t understand it. It seemed like an unbearably long, tedious way to get answers to problems that they could quickly solve using traditional arithmetic. I once had a parent complain to me and ask why any educator would prefer this new method over the old one when the old one produced answers faster and more easily. I told them, “Don’t think of it as math. Think of it as brain training.” This new math wasn’t designed to get the answer fast or easily. It was designed to get our children to think in a different way, to be able to see things from non-linear perspectives, to become better problem solvers. I asked the parent if they had ever played a musical instrument. They said yes and I asked them what they expected to accomplish after practicing for 20 minutes. They said, “Not much. It still won’t be perfect, but if you spend 20 minutes a day practicing, you’ll get better overall, eventually.” I told them that Common Core math was just like practicing the piano. If you reframe it that way, helping your child with homework becomes a lot easier. You’re helping them practice, that’s all. Getting the right answer is a byproduct of training your brain and not the goal itself. Process over product. 

Consistent mental exposure to new concepts, practice that consistently challenges, encourages resilience and a mindset of antifragility. By contrast, avoidance of mental discomfort causes a more fragile state of mind. This is similar to the therapy some people with peanut allergies undergo in which they are exposed to tiny amounts of peanut oil until a tolerance is built up and the allergy becomes non-life threatening. Similarly, exposure to one’s fears can help reduce anxiety. If you are afraid of riding in an elevator, it is recommended that you do so as often as possible because if we avoid what makes us anxious, the relief we feel is short-lived. As our tolerance for anxiety shrinks, our anxieties grow. 

It takes consistent exposure and growth to maintain good mental health. We have to be put under a healthy amount of stress to discover our boundaries and know what we can and can’t deal with. To better understand ourselves and thus better function in the world we have to have opportunities to get to know ourselves, to find and define our growing edges… and we have to be willing to do so, which means we have to be willing to admit when we don’t know something. Having a growth mindset is not currently modeled in our society by many in positions of power. Admitting you have a growing edge, or even just having one at all, is seen as a weakness. However, people without growing edges are rigid and things that are rigid can break. 

Many of us have heard of the concept of Kintsugi, the practice of repairing Japanese pottery with a lacquer mixed with powdered gold or silver. This lovely concept helps people understand that breakage and repair is a part of life and that we can be made even more beautiful and valuable after breaking. The only thing I don’t love about this concept is that the pottery’s rigidity makes it fragile in the first place. We are not inanimate objects that break easily. We are organic beings that are designed to become stronger with stress and like the tomato vine, we are meant to bend. It is, in fact, our ability to bend, that keeps us from breaking. Our resilience means we are naturally antifragile.   

And yet, even though our physical bodies support the concept of antifragility, we have been a society moving in the opposite direction. We have somehow decided that being uncomfortable means you have experienced trauma. Now, there is of course, real trauma being experienced by people here and abroad, but perspective also dictates that there is a sliding scale from discomfort to trauma and that our negative experiences will fall somewhere on that scale. Labeling every discomfort as trauma that should be avoided is weakening our minds. I think we can agree that actual trauma and abuse should always be avoided if possible. But discomfort is what helps us learn and grow. My very dear friend, Poet and educator Jenny Husk once said, “We cannot seek to have painless educations; if it doesn't hurt, it's probably not getting deep enough. The pain is not the goal, of course, but it is the catalyst and the sealant. If your bones start to disintegrate, you don't just sit around until they disappear, you get up and pound the ground so they can remineralize. Let us not fear the pain, but the atrophy.”

I am not minimizing the real traumas that have occurred here in this country. We are still healing from the traumas of slavery and the slaughtering of indigenous people. Currently, we are a country licking our wounds, and those wounds are real. The severity of those historic atrocities as well as those that are happening now, like the harm being caused by ICE activity, should be witnessed, acknowledged, and should support a healthy understanding of what trauma actually is. By contrast, it should also help us understand that some of what we experience could be considered temporary discomfort. For example, words. We need to move away from policing the words of others because it could trigger someone’s trauma. Of course, we need to continue to encourage respect and we must understand how our words affect others, but littering the floor with egg shells before we walk into a room does not encourage authenticity or a society that is antifragile. It is important to be sensitive to those in our communities who are struggling and those who may be more sensitive than most. However, in some instances we have catered to the sensitive to such a degree that we have become ineffective and dysfunctional. There is a sweet spot where society supports and challenges individuals. As our society has become polarized, we have lost a shared understanding of exactly how much discomfort and challenge people need to face in order to become less fragile and more resilient. 

This is a painful reality for parents raising children in these modern times. As parents attempt to minimize the trauma their children experience, they have developed helicopter parenting styles that have in turn raised children who aren’t resilient, don’t understand boundaries, and don’t experience the freedom and potential being bored offers. This is obviously not the case with every parent and every child, but the trend is apparent: our children don’t know how to be resilient. And what is a parent to do about it? 

Nassim Taleb says, “This is the tragedy of modernity: as with neurotically overprotective parents, those trying to help are often hurting us the most.” The phenomenon of healers creating harm is called Iatrogenics. Taleb says that people who set out to heal problems “come armed with solutions to solve the first-order consequences of a decision but create worse second and subsequent-order consequences.” It seems that sometimes it’s better to let the problem actually be experienced. 

So, how do we balance all of this in our daily lives? How do we recognize the difference between discomfort and trauma? How do we find the sweet spot between supporting each other and challenging each other in healthy ways that encourage growth? How do we embody resilience and help create a culture and society that values growth and flexibility over rigidity, shame, and blame?

To start, let’s pay attention, to others, to their struggles and traumas, and to ourselves, to our feelings, our reactions, our discomforts, our mindsets. Let’s notice when things bend and when things break, when things grow, when we grow. Let’s embrace our natural resilience and lean away from fragility. We can’t change ourselves or the world overnight. It will take time. In the meanwhile, let us escape to our gardens where the sun flowers turn toward the light and the tomato vines hold the secret to a life of strength and resilience.

May it be so. Amen.

OTHER READINGS FOR REFLECTION:

In Perpetual Spring by Amy Gerstler

Gardens are also good places

to sulk. You pass beds of

spiky voodoo lilies   

and trip over the roots   

of a sweet gum tree,   

in search of medieval   

plants whose leaves,   

when they drop off   

turn into birds

if they fall on land,

and colored carp if they   

plop into water.

Suddenly the archetypal   

human desire for peace   

with every other species   

wells up in you. The lion   

and the lamb cuddling up.

The snake and the snail, kissing.

Even the prick of the thistle,   

queen of the weeds, revives   

your secret belief

in perpetual spring,

your faith that for every hurt   

there is a leaf to cure it.

Failure Builds Resilience and Antifragility; Christie Solomon, Elevate Next

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who coined “antifragility,” argues that being antifragile goes beyond resilience. Rather than simply reacting to and surviving a failure, being antifragile means embracing the randomness of unforeseen setbacks and developing an increasing ability to pivot and adapt. Antifragility is learning and thriving because of failure and adversity. We are not born resilient or antifragile. Both are learned skills, a combination of traits that develop in response to challenges.

Beyond Resilience: Fostering Anti-Fragile Children; Steve Baskin, Psychology Today

Wanting our children to be resilient is too low a goal, they need to be more. The most important job any of us will ever have is raising our children. We parents embrace this opportunity with joy, but also worry. Often parents focus on two questions:

“What is the best way to raise a wonderful human?” We want to prepare our children to be contributing, caring, successful individuals.

“How can I keep my child safe?” We also want to keep our children protected from harm and danger.

Both of these goals are critical, but I often see parents obsess on the second question in ways that harm the first. Our desire to protect our children from harm and danger often grows into a compulsion to protect them from discomfort or disappointment. Ironically, our efforts to protect our children can actually harm them. Why is that? Because children are “anti-fragile”.

Originally coined by Nassim Taleb, I have become fascinated with a concept of “anti-fragility.” Here is a simple explanation:

• Some things are fragile, like a crystal glass. If you expose it to stress (drop it), it will break.

• Other things are resilient, like a plastic cup. If you expose it to stress, it remains the same.

• But a small subset of things are anti-fragile. When exposed to stress, they become stronger.

In fact, they cannot function properly unless stressed or challenged. One example is our immune systems: children that are exposed to germs early on have stronger and more robust immune systems later. Bones are anti-fragile. Astronauts who go into zero-gravity situations return with weaker, more brittle bones because they need the stress of gravity to remain strong.

After working with children for almost three decades, I can strong assert that humans, especially children, are anti-fragile. They do best when exposed to challenges, disappointments and even the occasional fight or insult. Please let me be clear, children must be protected from true bullies or real dangers (they should not play with chainsaws). But we do not help them by protecting them from any social awkwardness or conflict.