Call bullshit
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“Life is pain, highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something.”
- —Westley, The Dread Pirate Roberts, The Princess Bride
Aus der Kriegsschule des Lebens: Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. — “From the military school of life: that which does not kill me, makes me stronger.”
Great mountains of electronic ink are spilt by digital prophets, thought leaders and others of the gentler fabric who seem, these days, to be inheriting the earth — I guess the Bible said it would happen, so we shouldn’t be surprised — about the importance of spaces to vouchsafe psychological safety: we are, it seems, an uncommonly fragile lot; at the best of times, the toxicity of banter is an existential threat, and now we are at a low ebb: our constitutions enfeebled by Covid-19, we are now so weak that best practice is to serve written warning before clearing your throat, for fear of mortally wounding nearby workmates, unused to human proximity.
But we can take these things a little far. Humans are antifragile things: we react well to little shocks: they toughen us up. insulating ourselves from them makes us yet more prone to them. It wasn’t Nassim Nicholas Taleb who first make this connection by the way, but Friedrich Nietzsche.