The Bed of Procrustes

by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

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  Quite revealing of human preferences that more suicides come from shame or loss of financial and social status than medical diagnoses.

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  “Wealthy” is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use intead the subtractive measure “unwealth,” that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.

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  Older people are most beautiful when they have what is lacking in the young: poise, erudition, wisdom, phronesis, and this post-heroic absence of agitation.

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  I went to a happiness conference; researchers looked very unhappy.

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  What fools call “wasting time” is most often the best investment.

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  Decline starts with the replacement of dreams with memories and ends with the replacement of memories with other memories.

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  You want to avoid being disliked without being envied or admired.

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  Read nothing from the past one hundred years; eat no fruits from the past one thousand years; drink nothing from the past four thousand years (just wine and water); but talk to no ordinary man over forty. A man without a heroic bent starts dying at the age of thirty.

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  Some pursuits are much duller from the inside. Even piracy, they say.

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  Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee.

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  Catholic countries had more serial monogamy than today, but without the need for divorce—life expectancy was short; marriage duration was much, much shorter.

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  The fastest way to become rich is to socialize with the poor; the fastest way to become poor is to socialize with the rich.

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  You will be civilized on the day you can spend a long period doing nothing, learning nothing, and improving nothing, without feeling the slightest amount of guilt.

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  Someone who says “I am busy” is either declaring incompetence (and lack of control of his life) or trying to get rid of you.

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  The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today’s employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

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  You are rich if and only if money you refuse tastes better than money you accept.

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  For most, success is the harmful passage from the camp of the hating to the camp of the hated.

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  To see if you like where you are, without the chains of dependence, check if you are as happy returning as you were leaving.

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  The difference between love and happiness is that those who talk about love tend to be in love, but those who talk about happiness tend to be not happy.

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  Modernity: we created youth without heroism, age without wisdom, and life without grandeur.

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  You can tell how uninteresting a person is by asking him whom he finds interesting.

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  The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention.

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  I wonder if anyone ever measured the time it takes, at a party, before a mildly successful stranger who went to Harvard makes others aware of it.

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  People focus on role models; it is more effective to find antimodels—people you don’t want to resemble when you grow up.

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  It is a good practice to always apologize, except when you have done something wrong.

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  Preoccupation with efficacy is the main obstacle to a poetic, noble, elegant, robust, and heroic life.

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  Some, like most bankers, are so unfit for success that they look like dwarves dressed in giants’ clothes.

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  Don’t complain too loud about wrongs done you; you may give ideas to your less imaginative enemies.

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  Most feed their obsessions by trying to get rid of them.

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  It is as difficult to change someone’s opinions as it is to change his tastes.

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  I have the fondest memories of time spent in places called ugly, the most boring ones of places called scenic.

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  Fitness is certainly the sign of strength, but outside of natural stimuli the drive to acquire fitness can signal some deep incurable weakness.

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  Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.

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  Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

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  They are born, then put in a box; they go home to live in a box; they study by ticking boxes; they go to what is called “work” in a box, where they sit in their cubicle box; they drive to the grocery store in a box to buy food in a box; they go to the gym in a box to sit in a box; they talk about thinking “outside the box”; and when they die they are put in a box. All boxes, Euclidian, geometrically smooth boxes.

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  Another definition of modernity: conversations can be more and more completely reconstructed with clips from other conversations taking place at the same time on the planet.

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  The twentieth century was the bankruptcy of the social utopia; the twenty-first will be that of the technological one.

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  Efforts at building social, political, and medical utopias have caused nightmares; many cures and techniques came from martial efforts.

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  The Web’s “connectedness” creates a peculiar form of informational and pseudosocial promiscuity, which makes one feel clean after Web rationing.

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  In most debates, people seem to be trying to convince one another; but all they can hope for is new arguments to convince themselves.

  * Versions of this point have been repeated and rediscovered throughout history—the last convincing one by Montaigne.

  CHARMING AND LESS CHARMING SUCKER PROBLEMS

  The most depressing aspect of the lives of the couples you watch surreptitiously arguing in restaurants is that they are almost always unaware of the true subject of argument.

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  It seems that it is the most unsuccessful people who give the most advice, particularly for writing and financial matters.

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  Rumors are only valuable when they are denied.

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  Over the long term, you are more likely to fool yourself than others.

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  There are two types of people: those who try to win and those who try to win arguments. They are never the same.

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  People usually apologize so they can do it again.

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  Mathematics is to knowledge what an artificial hand is to the real one; some amputate to replace.

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  Modernity inflicts a sucker narrative on activities; now we “walk for exercise,” not “walk” with no justification; for hidden reasons.

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  Social media are severely antisocial, health foods are empirically unhealthy, knowledge workers are very ignorant, and social sciences aren’t scientific at all.

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  For so many, instead of looking for “cause of death” when they expire, we should be looking for “cause of life” when they are still around.

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  It is those who use others who are the most upset when someone uses them.

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  If someone gives you more than one reason why he wants the job, don’t hire him.

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  Failure of second-order thinking: he tells you a secret and somehow expects you to keep it, when he just gave you evidence that he can’t keep it himself.

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  Social networks present information about w
hat people like; more informative if, instead, they described what they don’t like.

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  People are so prone to overcausation that you can make the reticent turn loquacious by dropping an occasional “why?” in the conversation.

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  I need to keep reminding myself that a truly independent thinker may look like an accountant.

  THESEUS, OR LIVING THE PALEO LIFE

  The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

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  My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.

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  I wonder if a lion (or a cannibal) would pay a high premium for free-range humans.

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  If you need to listen to music while walking, don’t walk; and please don’t listen to music.

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  Men destroy each other during war; themselves during peacetime.

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  Sports feminize men and masculinize women.

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  Technology can degrade (and endanger) every aspect of a sucker’s life while convincing him that it is becoming more “efficient.”

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  The difference between technology and slavery is that slaves are fully aware that they are not free.

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  You have a real life if and only if you do not compete with anyone in any of your pursuits.

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  With terminal disease, nature lets you die with abbreviated suffering; medicine lets you suffer with prolonged dying.

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  We are satisfied with natural (or old) objects like vistas or classical paintings but insatiable with technologies, amplifying small improvements in versions, obsessed about 2.0, caught in a mental treadmill.

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  Only in recent history has “working hard” signaled pride rather than shame for lack of talent, finesse, and, mostly, sprezzatura.

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  Their idea of the sabbatical is to work six days and rest for one; my idea of the sabbatical is to work for (part of) a day and rest for six.

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  What they call “play” (gym, travel, sports) looks like work; the harder they try, the more captive they are.

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  Most modern efficiencies are deferred punishment.

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  We are hunters; we are only truly alive in those moments when we improvise; no schedule, just small surprises and stimuli from the environment.

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  For everything, use boredom in place of a clock, as a biological wristwatch, though under constraints of politeness.

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  Decomposition, for most, starts when they leave the free, social, and uncorrupted college life for the solitary confinement of professions and nuclear families.

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  For a classicist, a competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.

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  Skills that transfer: street fights, off-path hiking, seduction, broad erudition. Skills that don’t: school, games, sports, laboratory—what’s reduced and organized.

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  You exist in full if and only if your conversation (or writings) cannot be easily reconstructed with clips from other conversations.

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  The English have random Mediterranean weather; but they go to Spain because their free hours aren’t free.

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  For most, work and what comes with it have the eroding effect of chronic injury.

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  Technology is at its best when it is invisible.

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  The difference between true life and modern life equals the one between a conversation and bilateral recitations.

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  When I look at people on treadmills I wonder how alpha lions, the strongest, expend the least amount of energy, sleeping twenty hours a day; others hunt for them. Caesar pontem fecit.*

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  Every social association that is not face-to-face is injurious to your health.

  * Literally, “Caesar built a bridge,” but the subtlety is that it can also suggest that “he had a bridge built for him.”

  THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS

  Writing is the art of repeating oneself without anyone noticing.

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  Most people write so they can remember things; I write to forget.

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  What they call philosophy I call literature; what they call literature I call journalism; what they call journalism I call gossip; and what they call gossip I call (generously) voyeurism.

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  Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

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  Critics may appear to blame the author for not writing the book they wanted to read; but in truth they are blaming him for writing the book they wanted, but were unable, to write.

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  Literature is not about promoting qualities, rather, airbrushing (your) defects.

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  For pleasure, read one chapter by Nabokov. For punishment, two.

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  There is a distinction between expressive hypochondria and literature, just as there is one between self-help and philosophy.

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  You need to keep reminding yourself of the obvious: charm lies in the unsaid, the unwritten, and the undisplayed. It takes mastery to control silence.

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  No author should be considered as having failed until he starts teaching others about writing.

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  Hard science gives sensational results with a horribly boring process; philosophy gives boring results with a sensational process; literature gives sensational results with a sensational process; and economics gives boring results with a boring process.

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  A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.

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  Just as there are authors who enjoy having written and others who enjoy writing, there are books you enjoy reading and others you enjoy having read.

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  A genius is someone with flaws harder to imitate than his qualities.

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  With regular books, read the text and skip the footnotes; with those written by academics, read the footnotes and skip the text; and with business books, skip both the text and the footnotes.

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  Double a man’s erudition; you will halve his citations.

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  Losers, when commenting on the works of someone patently more impressive, feel obligated to unnecessarily bring down their subject by expressing what he is not (“he is not a genius, but …”; “while he is no Leonardo …”) instead of expressing what he is.

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  You are alive in inverse proportion to the density of clichés in your writing.

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  What we call “business books” is an eliminative category invented by bookstores for writings that have no depth, no style, no empirical rigor, and no linguistic sophistication.

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  Just like poets and artists, bureaucrats are born, not made; it takes normal humans extraordinary effort to keep attention on such boring tasks.

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  The costs of specialization: architects build to impress other architects; models are thin to impress other models; academics write to impress other academics; filmmakers try to impress other filmmakers; painters impress art dealers; but authors who write to impress book editors tend to fail.

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  It is a waste of emotions to answer critics; better to stay in print long after they are dead.

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  I can predict when an author is about to plagiarize me, and poorly so when he writes that Taleb “popularized” the theory of Black Swan events.*

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  Newspaper readers exposed to real prose are like deaf pe
rsons at a Puccini opera: they may like a thing or two while wondering, “what’s the point?”

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  Some books cannot be summarized (real literature, poetry); some can be compressed to about ten pages; the majority to zero pages.

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  The exponential information age is like a verbally incontinent person: he talks more and more as fewer and fewer people listen.

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  What we call fiction is, when you look deep, much less fictional than nonfiction; but it is usually less imaginative.

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  It’s much harder to write a book review for a book you’ve read than for a book you haven’t read.

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  Most so-called writers keep writing and writing with the hope to, some day, find something to say.

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  Today, we mostly face the choice between those who write clearly about a subject they don’t understand and those who write poorly about a subject they don’t understand.

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  The information-rich Dark Ages: in 2010, 600,000 books were published, just in English, with few memorable quotes. Circa AD zero, a handful of books were written. In spite of the few that survived, there are loads of quotes.

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  In the past, most were ignorant, one in a thousand were refined enough to talk to. Today, literacy is higher, but thanks to progress, the media, and finance, only one in ten thousand.

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  We are better at (involuntarily) doing out of the box than (voluntarily) thinking out of the box.

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  Half of suckerhood is not realizing that what you don’t like might be loved by someone else (hence by you, later), and the reverse.