What do I want to do?

This sounds like a question with an obvious answer, but the more I reflect on it, the more I notice complexity and subtleties.

First, there's a difficult tradeoff between what I want locally and globally: I regularly wish to do thing in the moment that would go against my global preferences (eat too much vs being healthy, watching random youtube videos vs reading the books I care about...), and I regularly don't want to do in the moment things that would push my global goals (study a boring topic, cook dinner, empty the dishwasher...)

But in addition, my preferences are also daily and hourly perturbed by external forces:

• Easy empty distractions, like youtube, social media, junk food...
• Internalized social norms, such as valuing depth and expertise and specialization, or feeling obligated to help people and contribute to the world^[1]
• Stimulus I get from the environment, such as my wife proposing some outing or me seeing a book title or a blog post that sounds interesting

In light of these difficulties, I've been searching for a practical model of preference satisfactions that helps me actually by happy about how I spent my day, without undue anxiety or regret.

I think I've found a starting point while reflecting on Taleb's triad of fragility, robustness, and antifragility.

Taleb's Triad

Taleb introduces his triad in his book Antifragile.

Notably, he asks what is the opposite of fragility. If fragile things get worse/break from randomness/variation/noise, then the opposite of fragile is not robust (things which resist randomness/variation/noise), but instead antifragile (things which benefit from randomness/ variation/noise).

And a big point of Taleb's book is that the same triad (fragile, robust, antifragile) reappears in many different settings, from the medical to the scientific- technological and the socio-political.

Indeed, it even applies to preference satisfaction.

Preference Fragility

As an anxious person, I am very good at fragilizing my preferences; that is, I'm very good at making myself less tolerant to noise/uncertainty/variations.

Which also means that I'm a decent exemplar from which to explore the mechanisms of preference fragilization.

Say I wake up tomorrow, and decide that I want to go to my favorite bakery in London, sit in my favorite spot, and eat some of their delicious almond financiers.

Have you noticed how I just innocently fragilized myself?

What if the bakery is closed today? What if I reach it and someone else is sitting in my spot? What if today — gasp — they don't bake the almond financiers?

In all of these cases, I'm bound to be disappointed, and pay some psychological cost of frustration and unhapinness.

Now, hopefully, I'm stable enough psychologically to not get significantly impacted by not getting the perfect bakery experience. But there are many situations where it's much easier (and much more natural) to take things very seriously, and to fragilize oneself massively in the process.

My best seller here is to start needing some things to happen a certain way at work: get the project that I want to lead, get the feedback that I want to receive, have the role that I feel is meaningful...

And I've cared and worried about this enough to reach mild burnout multiple times in the last couple of years.

Same can happen with love life, family, holidays, hobbies...

Now, the important point of preference fragilization is that it's something I'm doing to myself. There are cases where the fragility is in the world, but in the examples I gave, this is truly not the case: if I hadn't hyped myself up about my ideal bakery experience , I would probably be fine with many alternatives: I could go eat a nan sausage roll at a great indian nearby, or cook pancakes.

Same with work: almost always, I'm able to manage and even thrive in situations quite different from the ones I was imagining/hoping for/envisioning, and the hurdle/pain actually comes from me convincing myself that the specific details I came up with are my actual preferences.

That’s not ideal; but in the spirit of antifragility, we can actually leverage this apparent problem -- it's much easier to change something inside you than something in the world.

Preference Robustness

The first step away from fragilization is robustness: remove the weakness to variation, or at the very least mitigate it as much as possible.

In practice, this looks like noticing preference fragilization (the attachment to some future option/result that is outside of your control), and actively fighting it.

For the detection part, I have found that preference fragilization smells like a mixture of hope and anxiety: hope for some great thing, something that would make you feel good, better, whole, satisfied; anxiety that it might not happen, that you might be refused this value by the gods.

As for fighting preference fragilization, I have a handful of strategies:

• Imagine that what you wish for won't happen, and try to anticipate what you could do in this situation.
  • In my example, if the bakery is closed, I can go to the indian place nearby.
  • This is a variant of Seneca's malorum praemeditatio, thinking in advance on the worst that might happen, so that it doesn't own and control you.
• Diversify by getting excited with alternative options (ideally decorrelated ones).
  • In my example, I can come up with a handful of exciting breakfasts options around the bakery (nan sausage roll, fancy brunch, brioche and hot chocolate)
  • This increases the probability of the preference being satisfied, since it's now less specific
• Transform the need to get this preference satisfied into the possibility
  • In my example, remind myself that I will be fine whatever happens, and that if the bakery is open, that's a bonus.
  • This is also quite stoic in inspiration: leveraging what comes your way, without needing or being a slave to it.

A pattern that emerges for at least 2 out of 3 strategies is the abstraction of preferences: from a very pointy and precise preference, you try to get to a broader and more encompassing preference.

There's something deep here: preferences are rarely hyper specific. Rather, what happens is that we latch onto specifics and tie the preference to them, reducing the range of our effective preference.

I had this problem with work: I got into these obsession with very specific roles or projects as THE thing I absolutely needed to do — nothing else was worth anything.

Yet after noticing the pattern (and burning out a couple of time), I realized that really, I cared much more about being of service (to the cause I'm working on) than the specific details of the job. Sure, some tasks are more fun or exciting than others, but that was never really the point.

This characterization made my work-related preferences more robust, much easier to satisfy, because they were fundamentally abstract: being of service can be instantiated in many ways, depending on what is most needed that day/month/year.

Preference Antifragility

The last level is antifragility: not only are you not messed up by variations, but you actually benefit from them.

But how can we even reach that for preference satisfaction?

The main point is to look for what can be leveraged/used in the situation you find yourself in.

Say the bakery was closed, Being able to find something else that you might do with almost no frustration is robust; taking this as an opportunity to try something completely different that you wouldn't have tried otherwise, that's antifragile.

The stoic would say that there is no situation that cannot be used for your purposes. Maybe the situation is so bad that the only thing you can use it for is as training ground, to practice virtue and be the best you can despite the difficulty. But in most cases, there are opportunities everywhere, hidden by the focus on what we wanted.

At work for example, I've often found that when I'm given a task that I would usually not want, with some effort I can turn this into a positive, say by focusing on what it teaches me that I would never have learned before.

It also reminds me of kintsugi, the traditional japanese art form that takes broken pottery and fixes it by highlighting the break with gold powder (or other shiny metals).

As Taleb writes, riding on stoic wisdom:

Wind extinguishes a candle and energizes fire.

Likewise with randomness, uncertainty, chaos: you want to use them, not hide from them. You want to be the fire and wish for the wind.

1. ^{^}

   I do believe that separating these external "shoulds"from your actual preferences is essential, especially if you want to do good. If you're struggling with it, I recommend Nate Soares' excellent blog post series Replacing Guilt.