burdening the world with 6 (six!) descendants sounds pretty entitled to me.
The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
31–40 of 42 posts
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#32Wow, I just found something really insightful. It was in the link that the parent article offered.
On Quora, the second highest response is excellent. It's from Michael O Church, and here's the heart of it:
"Resiliency comes from an ability to realistically analyze setbacks, which often have complex causes. People who aren't resilient have a variety of unhealthy tendencies, listed from the most unhealthy to the least:
* Internalize the rejection. ("It happened because I'm a loser.") This leads to depression and implosion.
* Exaggerate the damage or long-lasting nature (perceived autocorrelation) of the rejection. ("Now that I got fired, I'll never get another job.") This leads to bitterness and "cold" anger, which is more dangerous than the "hot" kind because it's long-lasting and tends toward generalization.
* Get angry about it. ("It happened because he is an asshole.") This leads to "hot" anger and, often, stupid behaviors (revenge).
* Prematurely generalize about the environment. ("It happened because is full of sharks.") This doesn't usually impair general psychological health, but it creates an inaccurate model of the world and leads to sub-optimal choices and lost opportunities in the future."
I'm going to have to find some way to get this in front of my face every day for a few months until I internalize it. I have found myself making each of those mistakes at times, and when presented in this manner, it is crystal clear that they are nothing more than reasoning errors.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, you could be successful if only the morons in the previous generation would let you? Is that how the previous generation became successful? Sounds like entitlement to me.
So, you could be successful if only the morons in the previous generation would let you? This isn't about me, personally. I'm fine. However, I think most people in my generation have been screwed, and the ones who have avoided it (present company included) tend to be fairly privileged. If you were born in 1990 in the U.S. with average means, then chances are that you're not beating away venture capitalists with a sti…
>>>"A meritocracy wouldn't give a shit how old you are. The age narcissism is just a way for rich people to brand themselves, because people of average means don't get their startups bought at age 24."
Holy cow! I never thought about that, but now that you mention it, there's no doubt that explains at least part of it.
I had thought either that they wanted (1) the coolness factor, (2) naive entrepreneurs that they could sway more easily, and/or (3) to make sure there was no family, so the entrepreneurs would work like crazed zombies.
I'm sure those factor in somewhat, but what you mention is probably a bigger factor.
The good thing is that the "real world" doesn't give a shit whether or not you start out rich. In other words, if you can overcome all the obstacles and produce something disruptive that succeeds, you will get the rewards.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#34I want proof that the "Entitlement Generation" actually exists. I see it talked about everywhere, yet never experience it. Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security that a shrinking workforce could never possibly sustain? If we have entitlement problems, our entire society has entitlement problems, not just a bunch of sheltered kids.
From charlieflowers' comment[1]:
Prematurely generalize about the environment. ("It happened because is an Entitlement Generation.")
People complaining about the entitlement generation are responding to their own fragility in a non-resilient way.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#35There seems to be a trend to invent new words for an old concept when writing articles. I don't know if the intention is to attract eye balls or to claim that "hey I invent this concept". But most of the times, what you discover is not new. Why invent "The concept of antifragility" when there is a word called "resilience" . Since English is not my first language, please correct me if I am wrong.
This is quite thoroughly explained in the book, the anti-fragile benefits from adversity, the resilient does not.
Nothing new under the sun, kids. Hormesis. Look it up.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#36I want proof that the "Entitlement Generation" actually exists. I see it talked about everywhere, yet never experience it. Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security that a shrinking workforce could never possibly sustain? If we have entitlement problems, our entire society has entitlement problems, not just a bunch of sheltered kids.
Actually, the "entitlement" our generation is accused of is different than the entitlement that refers to programs like social security. The difference is one of connotation. The former implies that us "kids" have feelings of entitlement in the sense that we think we deserve everything (but actually don't). Whereas the latter is the literal meaning of entitlement, i.e. people pay a certain amount of money out of every paycheck for decades, and as a result are entitled to the returns in the form of social security when they retire.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#37I want proof that the "Entitlement Generation" actually exists. I see it talked about everywhere, yet never experience it. Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security that a shrinking workforce could never possibly sustain? If we have entitlement problems, our entire society has entitlement problems, not just a bunch of sheltered kids.
Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security
I think baby boomers have a lot to be sorry for, but I hate when people handwave social security for them as a pure "entitlement" when they spent their entire working lives paying into the system.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#38I want proof that the "Entitlement Generation" actually exists. I see it talked about everywhere, yet never experience it. Why, exactly, is my generation different from an older generation that thinks it's entitled to social security that a shrinking workforce could never possibly sustain? If we have entitlement problems, our entire society has entitlement problems, not just a bunch of sheltered kids.
I agree with other posters that it's unfair to complain that the so-called "entitlement generation" is any less hard-working than the ones that came before, because when push comes to shove, when they realize the necessity, they do work just as hard. That isn't to say that there haven't been generational changes, though. This generation, and mine before it, was overpraised by its parents to a degree that rarely happened in previous generations. When I read about people working hard to receive the praise of their parents, and feeling proud when praised by a teacher, I can't relate at all. It sounds as old-fashioned as mending clothes or having three channels on TV. Since when was praise a scarce, valued commodity? My generation (born in the late seventies) lived in praise like fish live in water. We don't feel it at all, but we feel its absence, keenly.
Also perhaps starting in my generation (though I missed it) and reaching its peak in the generation now coming to adulthood, was the phenomenon of training children to negotiate with their superiors. Parents train their children that they can always get a little more by asking for it. Argumentation, charm, and manipulation are implicitly encouraged. As a result, kids who have expectations laid down by a boss and teacher count on being able to move those expectations simply by asking. When a professor sticks to the grading standard described on the syllabus, many students are honestly shocked and bewildered. They come in, show their distress, plead, negotiate, and get... nothing? You always get something when you ask for it. To people who haven't been brought up that way, that attitude surely sounds like entitlement, and indeed a student behaving that way decades ago would have been branded "spoiled" and mocked among the teachers, but now it is regarded as a socially normal behavior that can't be held against the individual student.
These are two of the new characteristics by which the "entitlement generation" is recognized. I blame these things on the parents, not on the children, and I think they are both regressions, in the sense that they make our culture less pleasant and less efficient. We have entirely lost the value of praise and at the same time obliged ourselves to produce and consume it incessantly. Negotiation is an expenditure of time and energy, and it is wasteful for a professor, or a manager, to entertain a parade of underlings wheedling for exceptions to policy, and to penalize people who spend their time working instead of honing their appeals, when instead everyone might be doing useful work under a policy that is fairly and uniformly applied.
So, I think the "entitlement generation" is accurately diagnosed, though not justly blamed. Their sense of entitlement is just an illusion that their parents programmed into them, an ultimately cruel one, designed to help them "get theirs" in a world of easy growth and riches. It reflects their parents' view of the world as a place where wealth increases inexorably and is handed out most freely to the individuals who, via self-regard and self-assertion, contrive to appear to deserve it most. Now they're adjusting to a world their parents did not prepare them for, and they're bound to look a little foolish at times, through no fault of their own.
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#39Rejection Therapy [1] is what I would think a perfect example of antifragility in the wild. [2] People learn to manage their anxiety in stressful social situations and become more resilient to rejection after playing for awhile. Entrepreneurs like Jia Jiang even leverage rejections to launch and grow their startups. [3] [1] http://rejectiontherapy.com [2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/healt..…
The third reference was beautiful. Thank you for posting that. I am a huge fan of pushing the envelope of things I find uncomfortable and I definitely need to think about doing something like this!
Re: The concept of antifragility: Shockingly Happy
#40Rejection Therapy [1] is what I would think a perfect example of antifragility in the wild. [2] People learn to manage their anxiety in stressful social situations and become more resilient to rejection after playing for awhile. Entrepreneurs like Jia Jiang even leverage rejections to launch and grow their startups. [3] [1] http://rejectiontherapy.com [2] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/healt..…
Rejection therapy has its ideological roots in Stoicism, just as the central ideas of this article does. Seneca talks about spending a few days each month wallowing in the things that you fear the most, so that they can't control you. And with regard to the anti-fragility thing, this is discussed at length also in Letters from a Stoic. Seneca talks about not being overly dominated by your fears, but also you can be a…
You would enjoy this site http://gettingstronger.org
Likewise http://mises.org/books/stoics.pdf
As a long-time fan of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, I was pleasantly surprised to discover the links between them and modern anarcho-capitalists like Hazlitt and Mises.