In my family, health was measured in cheek color. If you were red and round in the face, you were healthy. If you were thin, something was wrong with you and you probably needed a second lunch. This was not a fringe position. It was the consensus medical framework of an entire generation of Romanian families who had survived communism, a period during which food scarcity was real enough that the ability to put three courses on the table at lunch became a form of existential proof. By the time I was growing up, the scarcity was gone but the three courses remained — along with the deep, unquestioned conviction that abundance at the table was the highest form of care a family could offer.
I say this not as complaint. My family loved me. They expressed it in “sarmale” and “ciorbă” and quantities of bread that would alarm a nutritionist but were, in context, a perfectly rational response to a world that had once been genuinely hungry. The fact that this same love helped produce a twenty-three-year-old who weighed 115 kilograms and thought he was fine because he didn’t smoke and didn’t drink is not their fault. It’s not anybody’s fault, really. It’s just what happens when the survival heuristics of one generation become the health risks of the next — which is, if you think about it, a pretty decent summary of most problems in human history.
What makes my story particularly ironic — and I use “ironic” here in the structural sense, not the Alanis Morissette sense — is that I wasn’t always sedentary. As a kid in Sinaia, I played football at the local club. I was active, competitive, the kind of child that the cheek-color theory would have described as thriving. Then, in eleventh grade, I had surgery for a cholesteatoma in my right ear — a benign but destructive growth that erodes the bones of the middle ear if left untreated. The surgery went well. The doctor told me to be careful. And I interpreted “be careful” with the creative freedom of a sixteen-year-old and turned it into “never play sport again, because what if a ball hits my head.”
It was a reasonable precaution. It was also an excellent excuse. And in the absence of anyone around me who understood the difference between a legitimate medical constraint and a comfortable rationalization, the excuse held. For years.
Through the lens of cultural anthropology
The relationship between food, love, and health in post-scarcity societies is one of the more poignant mismatches in modern life. Sidney Mintz, in Sweetness and Power (1985), traced how sugar went from aristocratic luxury to industrial staple to metabolic crisis across three centuries — a trajectory in which each generation’s solution became the next generation’s problem. The pattern is not unique to sugar. It applies to portion sizes, meat consumption, and the emotional architecture of feeding.
In rural and small-town Romania — and Sinaia, where I grew up, carries this inheritance — food is not nutrition. It is relationship. Refusing a second helping is not a dietary decision. It is a social signal, and the signal it sends is: your food is not good enough, your home is not welcoming enough, your love is not accepted. Try explaining the glycemic index to a grandmother whose identity is structured around her ability to fill a table. The glycemic index will lose. It will lose every time, comprehensively, and with dessert.
I am not mocking this. I am describing, with what I hope is appropriate tenderness and only slight irony, the cultural operating system I was running when I arrived at 115 kilograms. The system was not broken. It was executing its instructions perfectly. The instructions were just written for a different environment — one where the primary risk was not having enough food, not having too much. The software worked. The hardware had changed. Nobody issued a patch. And I, having quit sport at sixteen with a doctor’s note that I’d silently upgraded to a lifetime exemption, had removed the one counterbalance that might have kept the system from overflowing.
Through the lens of cardiology
By twenty-three, I had settled into a lifestyle that a clinician would describe as “high-risk” and that I would have described as “normal.” I played World of Warcraft and Minecraft until three in the morning. I ate without rhythm or logic. I slept when the game let me, which was rarely when the body needed me to. I weighed 115 kilograms. I didn’t smoke. I didn’t drink. And I operated under the sincere belief that these two abstentions constituted a health strategy — that not doing the obviously destructive things was the same as doing the constructive ones. This is the metabolic equivalent of not setting your house on fire and calling it interior design.
Then my heart became inflamed. Viral myocarditis — an infection that settles in the cardiac muscle and, if things go poorly, stays there permanently. I recovered fully, which is a statistical outcome I did not appreciate at the time and appreciate considerably more now. The cardiologist was polite about lifestyle changes. My body, which had just demonstrated that it could produce a cardiac event at twenty-three while abstaining from every traditional vice, was less polite. The message was clear, even to someone raised on the cheek-color theory of medicine: not smoking and not drinking is a floor, not a ceiling. And I had been standing on the floor, playing video games until dawn, congratulating myself on the view.
The obesity paradox — a well-documented phenomenon in cardiovascular medicine, confirmed by multiple meta-analyses including Tutor et al. (2023) in Progress in Cardiovascular Disease — observes that overweight and mildly obese patients with established cardiovascular disease sometimes have better short-term survival than normal-weight patients with the same conditions. The explanation remains contested and likely involves confounding factors. I mention it because it illustrates the non-linearity I keep encountering: the relationship between weight, health, and outcomes is not a straight line. The assumption that thinner always equals healthier — which motivated my subsequent transformation — is itself a model. And like all models, it works until it doesn’t.
Through the lens of materials science
In materials science, there is a critical distinction between two failure modes: acute overload and fatigue failure. Acute overload occurs when a force exceeds the material’s ultimate strength — it breaks immediately and dramatically. Fatigue failure is subtler: repeated sub-threshold loads, each causing microscopic damage that accumulates invisibly, until the material fails suddenly at a force it had handled a thousand times before.
My body produced both, in sequence. I consider this an impressive range for someone whose primary goal was to become healthier.
The myocarditis was the wake-up call. I found a diabetologist and nutrition specialist, overhauled everything, and dropped from 115 to 70 kilograms over the following months. I didn’t do it through starvation or supplements or whatever influencers recommend this week. I did it through the boring, unsexy, methodical process of eating appropriately and moving more, guided by an actual doctor — which is the medical equivalent of “have you tried turning it off and on again?” Unglamorous. Effective. Deeply unsatisfying to anyone hoping for a dramatic narrative.
Then I started running. Kilometres on actual roads, in actual shoes, with a cardiovascular system that was, for the first time in my adult life, performing as designed. I felt indestructible, which is — and I say this with the benefit of hindsight and two damaged knees — exactly how you feel right before you find out you’re not.
The right knee: a partial tear of the anterior cruciate ligament, most likely originating from a winter slip on icy stairs where my leg rotated in a direction that knees, from an engineering standpoint, were not designed to accommodate. The left knee: a grade 2 meniscus tear, probably from the sustained impact of running on concrete — a surface that returns 100% of the force you put into it, which is physics performing exactly to specification and my meniscus performing exactly not to. Neither required surgery. Both ended my running. These are textbook examples of the two failure modes: the ACL was pre-weakened by acute trauma and failed under fatigue loading; the meniscus accumulated damage through pure fatigue until it crossed its threshold.
I had built a cardiovascular system that could run for hours. The musculoskeletal system — the part that actually touches the ground — gave out first, because I had trained one system and assumed the other would keep up. In materials engineering, this is called interface failure: the strongest component is only as durable as the weakest joint connecting it to the structure.
Through the lens of immunology and lived experience
Here is where the story gets cyclical, and the cycle is the point.
Twelve years after my first cholesteatoma surgery, the growth recurred. I needed a second operation. The initial plan was an open technique — which would have left a permanent cavity in my ear, requiring cleaning every three months and permanent water restrictions. During the surgery, the surgeons revised their approach and performed a closed technique instead, preserving a functional tympanum. Three months later, I had a septum deviation corrected as well. Two surgeries in three months, both in the same anatomical neighbourhood, both successful. I was grateful, cautious, and — after nearly a year of recovery — ready to return to sport. Properly this time.
I hired a personal trainer. Because I had learned, presumably, that doing things on my own without guidance leads to problems. The personal trainer put me through exercises that were far too heavy for my deconditioned body. Within one week, I could barely roll over in bed, let alone get out of it. My body, which had just spent a year recovering from two surgeries, was being asked to perform at a level it hadn’t seen in years — possibly ever — by someone whose job it was to know better.
Then I caught Epstein-Barr virus. My immune system, already at its limit from the excessive training load, responded by attacking my most vulnerable region — the ENT zone that had just been surgically rebuilt. Four to six months of complications followed. The personal trainer was dismissed. Recovery, again, was gradual.
The pattern, by this point, should be visible even without a diagram: build up, break down. Optimize, discover the thing you didn’t optimize for. Return to baseline. Repeat. Each cycle starts with genuine progress and ends with a reminder that progress and fragility are not opposites — they are, more often than I’d like, the same trajectory viewed from different moments.
Then came the professional frustration. Post-pandemic, the world I worked in shifted. Remote work scattered the team. Relationships that had been maintained by physical proximity degraded without the energy input that proximity had quietly provided — which is, if you’ve read the article on Entropy, a phenomenon I now have a name for. I became frustrated, focused on work, and let sport go again. Because it was easier. Because the body wasn’t hurting — or at least wasn’t hurting in ways that demanded immediate attention. Because the absence of exercise doesn’t send you a notification. It just quietly adjusts the structural load capacity of every tissue in your body downward, and waits.
Over two years, I went from 70 back to 86 kilograms. And then — because the universe has a commitment to thematic consistency that I can only admire — I hung from a pull-up bar and the cycle started again. But I’ve written about that elsewhere, and this article has enough structural irony without repeating it.
Through the lens of Nassim Taleb
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), proposed that systems fall into three categories: fragile (harmed by volatility), robust (indifferent to it), and antifragile (strengthened by it). The central argument is that modern optimization systematically produces fragility by eliminating redundancy — the margin, the buffer, the slack that absorbs unexpected shocks.
My story is not a single fragility event. It is a repeating fragility cycle, which is both worse and more instructive. Each time I built the system up — lost the weight, started the training, hired the expert — I was also narrowing the margin. The optimized body was healthier by every metric and more vulnerable to the specific stressor that happened to arrive next. The knees broke from running. The ENT zone broke from over-training. The shoulder broke from a dead hang after months of inactivity. Different inputs, same structural pattern: a system optimized to its operating conditions, with no buffer for conditions outside the design envelope.
Taleb wrote in Nature in 2013 that fragility is mathematically a concave sensitivity to stressors — the harms from negative events outweigh the benefits from positive ones. What my biography adds to his framework is a temporal dimension: fragility isn’t just a static property. It cycles. You become fragile, you break, you rebuild, and if you rebuild the same way — optimizing for the known threats without adding margin for the unknown ones — you become fragile again, to a different stressor, on a different timeline. The content changes. The structure repeats.
Through the lens of philosophy
Seneca, in Letters to Lucilius, advocated deliberately practicing discomfort — not as penance but as preparation. His logic was practical, not moral: comfort extended without interruption produces a specific vulnerability. The inability to function when comfort is removed. And comfort is always, eventually, removed. Seneca knew this from direct experience — he was eventually ordered to commit suicide by the emperor he’d tutored, which is the kind of career outcome that really drives the point home about impermanence.
The Stoic insight maps onto my story with uncomfortable precision. Every phase where I stopped training — after the cholesteatoma, after the knees, after the personal trainer disaster, after the pandemic frustration — was a phase where comfort accumulated into fragility. Not because I was lazy. Because the absence of controlled stress is invisible, and invisible things don’t generate urgency. You don’t notice the tissue weakening. You don’t notice the cardiovascular fitness declining. You don’t notice the buffer shrinking. You notice when the buffer is needed and isn’t there, which is always too late, and which has now happened to me enough times that I should probably stop being surprised by it.
Nietzsche’s aphorism — “what does not kill me makes me stronger” — needs more footnotes than most people give it. Some stressors that don’t kill you make you stronger. My myocarditis did. Others leave you with two partially torn knee ligaments and a revised understanding of what “progress” means. The difference is dose and preparation. The aphorism should read: “What does not kill me makes me stronger, provided the dosage is appropriate, the tissues are conditioned, the surface is forgiving, and I haven’t just spent a year recovering from two surgeries while my personal trainer experiments with my structural integrity.” Less quotable. Considerably more accurate.
Connections
Fragility sits in dialogue with Overfitting — both are optimization errors, pointing in different directions. Overfitting over-learns from available data. Fragility under-prepares for unavailable data. I do both, sometimes simultaneously, which I consider a form of cognitive diversification — or at least that’s what I tell myself. Fragility connects to Entropy because entropy is the background force that fragile systems cannot withstand — and each time I stopped training, I was essentially allowing entropy to erode the structural margins I’d built. It connects to Enough because my definition of “enough” transformation was set at “maximum” each time, and maximum is precisely the level at which there is no margin left for the unexpected. And it connects to Resonance because the people who might have told me “maybe don’t run on concrete” or “maybe that personal trainer is an idiot” — the relational redundancy that buffers against bad individual decisions — were largely absent, because I’d been optimizing my body in solitude rather than building the human connections that catch you when your systems fail.
What I Don’t Know
I haven’t explored the ecology of keystone species removal — what happens when you take one critical element out of an ecosystem and watch the cascade, which might be the right framework for what happened when exercise was removed from my body’s ecosystem and everything downstream recalibrated toward a lower-energy equilibrium. I haven’t examined the psychology of the control illusion — Ellen Langer’s foundational work on how people overestimate their influence over outcomes — which might explain why carefully planned transformations gave me the feeling of invulnerability rather than what they actually gave me, which was a thinner body running on structural foundations that were never stress-tested against the specific loads they would encounter. I haven’t looked at the economics of sunk costs as applied to physical transformation — where the effort invested in becoming lean makes it psychologically impossible to accept that leanness itself might have introduced new vulnerabilities. And I haven’t examined the political dimension, though it tempts me: whether austerity programs that optimize budgets by cutting redundancy are the macroeconomic equivalent of my repeated cycle — efficient on the spreadsheet, fragile in practice, one crisis away from discovering what the margin was for.
Where I Stand
I’ve been through this cycle enough times now to see it for what it is. Not bad luck. Not a character flaw. A pattern — and patterns, once identified, can be managed. Not eliminated, because I’m still the person who reads meta-analyses on a Saturday morning and finds it genuinely exciting. But managed.
What I’ve learned, through a sequence of events that includes a cardiac inflammation, two cholesteatoma surgeries, a septum correction, two knee injuries, an overzealous personal trainer, an Epstein-Barr infection, a pandemic-era professional crisis, a disc protrusion, and a shoulder injury from a three-second dead hang — which is either an impressive medical CV or evidence that the universe has a subscription model for irony — is something that no single event could have taught me: the body is not a project to be completed. It is an environment to be inhabited. Carefully, progressively, with more respect for its constraints than I have historically offered, and less confidence in my ability to control its outcomes than I initially assumed.
I am more careful now. I do my physiotherapy. I walk instead of run. I pay attention to what hurts and, more importantly, to what doesn’t hurt yet but will if I ignore the signals. I’ve stopped hiring personal trainers who treat deconditioned bodies like military recruits, which is a heuristic I wish I’d developed earlier and cheaper. I’ve started treating sport not as something I do intensely for a period and then abandon, but as something I do moderately, consistently, without heroics and without excuses. Which is, thermodynamically speaking, the only sustainable approach: a steady, low-amplitude energy input that maintains the system without exceeding its adaptive capacity. It’s less dramatic than a transformation story. It’s also less likely to end in an MRI.
The most important shift, though, is not physical. It’s perspective. I’ve started to understand what actually matters — and what doesn’t, despite feeling urgent during a workday spiral when the browser has fifteen tabs open and the zona incerta is firing. Health matters. Movement matters. Showing up matters — imperfectly, consistently, without waiting for the optimal plan that never arrives because optimal plans are fragile and showing up is antifragile. The world is more chaotic and less controllable than I believed at twenty-three, when I thought not smoking was a health strategy. It is also more navigable than it felt at my worst moments, when the cycle seemed like a sentence rather than a curriculum.
I am trying to become antifragile. Not in the grand, Talebian sense — not a system that benefits from disorder, which is a beautiful concept and a difficult life. In the simpler, more honest sense: a person who learns from what breaks, adjusts the approach, and continues. Not because I’ve found the optimal path. Because continuing, imperfectly, turns out to be the path. The only one that doesn’t dead-end into another cycle of fragility. The only one I haven’t already tried and broken.
Written: April 2026 Version: 1.0 This is how I understand this concept today. It will change.
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