The Touristification of the Soccer Mom
Taleb argues that filling children’s lives with scheduled activities leaves too little room for trial and error, curiosity, and learning to handle ambiguity. He contrasts this with self-directed learning that allows for unplanned encounters and discoveries.
THE IDEA
The Touristification of the Soccer Mom
The biologist and intellectual E. O. Wilson was once asked what represented the most hindrance to the development of children; his answer was the soccer mom. He did not use the notion of the Procrustean bed, but he outlined it perfectly. His argument is that they repress children’s natural biophilia, their love of living things. But the problem is more general; soccer moms try to eliminate the trial and error, the antifragility, from children’s lives, move them away from the ecological and transform them into nerds working on preexisting (soccer-mom-compatible) maps of reality. Good students, but nerds—that is, they are like computers except slower. Further, they are now totally untrained to handle ambiguity. As a child of civil war, I disbelieve in structured learning—actually I believe that one can be an intellectual without being a nerd, provided one has a private library instead of a classroom, and spends time as an aimless (but rational) flâneur benefiting from what randomness can give us inside and outside the library. Provided we have the right type of rigor, we need randomness, mess, adventures, uncertainty, self-discovery, near-traumatic episodes, all these things that make life worth living, compared to the structured, fake, and ineffective life of an empty-suit CEO with a preset schedule and an alarm clock. Even their leisure is subjected to a clock, squash between four and five, as their life is sandwiched between appointments. It is as if the mission of modernity was to squeeze every drop of variability and randomness out of life—with (as we saw in Chapter 5) the ironic result of making the world a lot more unpredictable, as if the goddesses of chance wanted to have the last word.
Only the autodidacts are free. And not just in school matters—those who decommoditize, detouristify their lives. Sports try to put randomness in a box like the ones sold in aisle six next to canned tuna—a form of alienation.
If you want to understand how vapid are the current modernistic arguments (and understand your existential priorities), consider the difference between lions in the wild and those in captivity. Lions in captivity live longer; they are technically richer, and they are guaranteed job security for life, if these are the criteria you are focusing on …
As usual, an ancient, here Seneca, detected the problem (and the difference) with his saying “We do not study for life, but only for the lecture room,” non vitae, sed scolae discimus, which to my great horror has been corrupted and self-servingly changed to fit the motto of many colleges in the United States, with non scolae, sed vitae discimus as their motto, meaning that “We study [here] for life, not for the lecture hall.”
Most of the tension in life will take place when the one who reduces and fragilizes (say the policy maker) invokes rationality.
When to use it
Parenting decisions about extracurricular activities and free time.
Educational curriculum design that balances structure with unstructured exploration.
Personal development by intentionally introducing randomness and novelty.
Workplace environments that allow for trial and error rather than rigid processes.
FROM THEORY TO EVERYDAY LIFE
In practice
The Over-scheduled Child
A child’s after-school schedule is packed with soccer practice, piano lessons, and tutoring, leaving little time for unstructured play. Taleb’s concern is that such a schedule restricts opportunities to choose an activity, make mistakes, and respond to something unexpected.
Lions in Captivity vs. Wild
Lions in captivity live longer and are technically 'richer' in terms of security, but they lack the randomness and challenges that define a wild lion's life, illustrating the trade-off between safety and antifragility.
A MOMENT TO REFLECT
Put it to work.
How does over-scheduling your child's activities affect their ability to handle uncertainty?
What aspects of your daily routine could be made more random to build antifragility?
In what ways might structured education hinder true learning, and how could autodidactism help?
Often confused with
CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION
Source texts
- Antifragile (Nassim Nicholas Taleb)