Antifragility and The Will to Love

Heracles and the Hydra, and The Human Will

Jan 13, 2024

(Update 1/13/2024: included missing cover art for Progenitus)

It’s a New Year.

I got an Airbnb this winter break and, despite the budget costs and the noisy neighbors, got reacquainted with a lot of books and places and flavors.

Some lines that linger with me

Quotes of the Day

Antifragility is not robustness, but the ability to become stronger in the face of adversity. Physical conditioning (going to the gym), posttraumatic growth, attenuated vaccines, Heracles and his fight with the Hydra, and exposure to non lethal amounts of poison are examples. Hopefully, if we find a way to grow back in the face of trauma, we can find a way to grow back stronger than before.

I just got back into playing Magic the Gathering, and the cover image of today’s article reflects this theme of antifragility. The art is a special Secret Lair print of the Magic the Gathering card, Progenitus, a massive 5 color, 5 headed Hydra with “protection from everything”. In the foreground of the art are more baby hydras growing from the ashes of a forest.

Where old life ends, life can also begin anew.

I also have a soft spot for this Secret Lair print because according to an interview with the artist, John Avon, he struggles with fatigue, pain, anxiety from CFS/ME. So to me, the art creates a story of a hydra that grows back stronger, and the story of a wonderful creative who also suffers from chronic illness who has endured much, and was able to come back to us to create beautiful work.

Support his work at: https://johnavonart.com/

Another quote that continuously dwells in my mind that comes back once again as we enter the New Year.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive. - James Baldwin

What is a man?

A brief interlude

During my break, I was thinking a lot about my work as a programmer, my falling away from game design over the past year. It felt as if I had been broken from a spell, where I pursued game design, designed and engineered my life to be a game designer, at any cost, and I finally had some distance to reflect on what it was to truly be a human being. Not a product of marketing, or the fears of a vulnerable twenty something, but a continuously deepening relationship with whatever truth seems to be in this world.

Books will do that. Often more so than social media.

There are a lot of reductive narratives we find in our world, in social media, in traditional media. The more I watch things nowadays, the more I feel these images attempt to reduce and flatten the human experience to statistics, marketing demographics, a series of hobbies and interests, and sinners, saints, worker, producer, creator, noncreator. But the world is so much richer and more complex than that. Your inner world, your outer world, your inner being bearing witness to the miracle of life and existence.

You are not a brand, or reducible to a singular set of marketable identities. You are not someone who is meant to be marketed to. You are a whole multifaceted human being with nuances, hopes, fears, dreams, weaknesses, strengths, virtues. You’ve done some good. You’ve done some bad. And even if you’ve done some things or had some things done to you that might have you believe you’re not worthy of happiness and joy. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be present, make each moment better for yourself and others, and respect the beauty of life in this universe.

Every person has faced the same hopes and fears that you have. Every child wanted a loving parent who understood them and could attend to their needs. Every student wanted to do well, have friends, and be respected by their peers. Every adult faces down the long corridor of life, seeing a series of doors that could be walked through, and as their life flashes by in front of them, watches as the doors start to close one by one. Every senior wishes they did well and can leave a legacy by which they’ll be remembered by, whether its from loved ones or their community, before they face life’s final mystery.

And what do all those things have in common? They’re all forms of the will to love throughout different phases in our lives.

Deep within us—no matter who we are—there lives a feeling of wanting to be lovable, of wanting to be the kind of person that others like to be with. And the greatest thing we can do is to let people know that they are loved and capable of loving. - Mr. Rogers

We all find ourselves in the tapestry of the universe, interwoven, connected to each other, fates linked through time, space, connection, words, images, ideas, arts, even through the internet, media, and commerce.

You, as an individual, are infinitely richer than us as an aggregate, a unique flower in a verdant field. Dive inwards, and you are infinitely deep and indeterminate at a subatomic level, yet somehow possessing a subjective soul, that persistently believes it has a subjective soul.

Yet, the aggregate of all of us, a verdant valley, gives life to the whole of human accomplishment and possibility, all its beauty, all its capacity to create, all its beastliness, all its capacity to destroy. A field of hopes and fears, pulled towards our own elemental natures, as if almost by gravity.

More conscious than ants, seemingly more conscious than a chimpanzees, certainly more conscious than a river, somehow not conscious enough to avoid repeatedly coming to the edge of world scale cataclysm, yet still able to make breakfast and go to work and care for loved ones and find ways to pass the years despite all this knowledge…

Anyway, that’s kind of like the lessons of peaceful humanism and rationalistic barbarism of 2023’s Barbenheimer (Barbie/Oppenheimer) dual feature! Which made it to my top of my movies of 2023 list!

Check out the VOD of that stream below, along with the the show notes!

Wishing you a New Year of individuality and many moments of meaning in this universe.

Blessings, and I wish you well.

My World

Top 5 Best (And Worst) Movies of 2023

Movies with Mudita & PRpHD 2023 Season Finale with a Twitch podcast

https://muditaheart.notion.site/Movies-of-2023-a53b1e5e375747389e0aaf24ef49338c?pvs=74

How to Fail (or Succeed!) at your New Year’s Resolutions

Another Mudita Deep Dive stream that we did on January 6, 2024

To follow for more of my Twitch, visit at https://www.twitch.tv/muditaheart

To follow more of my Youtube, visit at https://www.youtube.com/@muditaheart

I mentioned visiting my friendly local game shop this past week. Played some Magic the Gathering Commander, and been checking out the buzz online. I sense fan sentiment is in a bit of rebellious mood against Hasbro’s latest handling of Wizards of the Coast, with some flocking towards Disney Lorcana… Hm…