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How Not to be a Turkey on Thanksgiving Ask a turkey a week before Thanksgiving if the farmer loves him. The farmer comes every day to feed the turkey and feed him well. He provides free accommodations: a nice yard to peck around in, water, shelter from predators. From the turkey’s perspective, a week before Thanksgiving, life has never been better. Nassim Nicholas Taleb explains “The Great Turkey Problem” in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.
A black swan event is an unexpected outlier event, difficult to predict because it is beyond the usual. But how do you prepare for such an event? The whole point is that you don’t know when it will take place, or what exactly will happen. It could be a financial collapse, a civil war, or an earthquake. The butcher would be bankers, the government, or mother nature. The answer is to become antifragile. Fragile people will be the turkey on the Thanksgiving table. These are the people whose only retirement plan is Social Security, who trade their rights for government security, or who build their homes in a flood zone. And what’s the opposite of fragile? Most people say robust, or unbreakable. But this isn’t quite right. Something fragile suffers from chaos. Something robust is unaffected by a bumpy ride. But something antifragile benefits from turmoil. Perhaps one method of becoming antifragile is to be diverse. Diversifying things like investments, skills, even diet and exercise at least makes you robust and could make you antifragile. If you’re holding cash when the housing market crashes, you can benefit by deploying that cash to scoop up property. But being all in cash exposes you to more risk if the black swan event is hyperinflation. So you also hold precious metals, which could cushion a stock market or currency collapse–robust–or even make you money in the right scenarios–antifragile. One hobby of mine is foraging for wild edible and medicinal plants. I’m also into reading up on food as medicine, and which compounds in herbs show promise in treating particular ailments. Currently, all this can be found online. It’s just a fun hobby, an extra activity during my frequent hikes in the woods. But if a certain type of black swan event wreaks havoc on our society, which has never been more stable… Well, a medicine man might make more than a writer in a post-apocalypse economy… Tell me in the comments the ways in which you are antifragile.
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