The Elephant of Fragility
Have we grown soft?
Like many others my age, I grew up hearing stories of resilience: grandparents walking miles through snow to school, or the patience millennials had to muster for the next episode of Gilmore Girls to drop. Modern conveniences like rideshares and streaming platforms have conditioned us to expect ease, shrinking our tolerance for discomfort or waiting. While I don’t yearn for rotary phones or fax machines, it’s worth questioning whether our cultural obsession with convenience is softening us in troubling ways. I believe our society is losing something vital as we pursue comfort: our resilience to conflict.
In this Staying Curious newsletter, we’re naming the Elephant of Fragility. This elephant appears stable, underpinned by a desire to “keep the peace,” but its avoidance of conflict is a trap. It operates out of fear—fear that speaking hard truths will irreparably harm relationships or others’ well-being. But in coddling ourselves and others, we are sacrificing the very resilience that helps us grow stronger amidst adversity.
The Cost of Fragility
A troubling trend is taking root: the belief that simply hearing opposing ideas is not just uncomfortable but outright harmful. Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt explore this in The Coddling of the American Mind, showing how efforts to shield young people from discomfort have led to sweeping changes in education and parenting. At an extreme, it’s led to boycotting speakers on college campuses and censoring school curriculum. Both of these examples limit free speech due to a perceived fragility in the recipients of the information. Rather than fulfilling what they claim to do (protect) these trends weaken the critical thinking skills in young people. These reforms seek to control what students think rather than putting energy towards teaching them how to think for themselves in the face of new information.
Our immune systems provide an accessible example to how overprotection can leave us more fragile. This powerful bodily system becomes stronger when exposed to manageable threats like dirt and germs. Just as a child must be exposed to appropriate levels of bacteria for their body to develop its defences, young people need exposure to divergent thoughts, adverse opinions, and even troubling rhetoric to cultivate the ability to filter information effectively. Shielding people from conflictual experiences denies them the ability to further develop their social and emotional resilience. While we may feel like we are protecting them in the short term, we are leaving them unprepared to navigate the complexity of real-world challenges in the long term.
The Antidote: Antifragility
Antifragility is the principle that adversity makes us stronger. Think of a tree sapling: one grown in a greenhouse is protected from wind and rain, developing shallow roots that fail it when planted outside. By contrast, a sapling exposed to natural elements adapts, sending its roots deeper to withstand the challenges. The same is true for us.
As an assistant volleyball coach, I’ve seen this principle in action. Wanting to expose our team to enough resistance in the short term so they grow more resilient in the long term. We hit our first bit of friction in our opening weekend. After the buildup of training during our preseason and the uncertainty of how we’d respond to regular-season competition, the two back-to-back losses felt deflating. More than a typical defeat, the impact seemed to ripple through the team, leaving a palpable heaviness in its wake.
As coaches, we recognized that these losses had the potential to lead to two very different trajectories: we could either succumb to the pressure or grow by learning from the challenge (and of course the spectrum between these two). Wanting to frame this as an opportunity for the team, we introduced them to the concept of antifragility. Acknowledging that by embracing this concept, we could view the disappointment as a chance to learn, to understand each other better, and to collaborate on how we were going to use this information to prepare for the remaining games in the season.
For athletes, the notion that resistance builds strength is second nature. Spending countless hours in the weight room or at practice, they are no strangers to the challenges required to improve. So shifting this into the social and emotional spheres resonated quite quickly. One player took the idea of antifragility to heart, and decided to take action.
Embracing the Tension
“I don’t want to be fragile.” This player spoke the words with determination and resolve. With an upbringing that made her acutely aware of conflict, she had learned to “keep the peace” as a way of survival. Yet she could see how her history was making her want to maintain the status quo by not confronting issues. What she thought was offering her protection, she could now see as coddling in a way that was making her fragile. She felt this nudge to have a hard conversation that was impacting her ability to perform on the court. She had hoped it would just sort itself out, but in the weeks that had passed the tension was only getting worse.
With the framework of antifragility, she reframed voicing her concerns as a chance to build resilience. “I don’t want to be fragile,” she told us, and with that resolve, she moved toward the uncomfortable conversation.
The Path to Strength: Go In, Go Up, Go Out
Addressing conflict has the potential to strengthen us, but its true transformative power lies in navigating it effectively. Conflict Agility provides a practical framework for harnessing this opportunity. Our volleyball team has embraced using the "Go In, Go Up, Go Out" method to build resilience and foster growth.
Go In: Pause and notice what you think and feel about a situation. What’s the tension telling you? What’s at stake? For this player, “going in” meant confronting her discomfort and naming her fear of conflict. By Going In, we gain emotional insight and self-awareness.
Go Up: From this place of emotional insight, we are less constrained, and we are better able to “Go Up.” This process invites individuals to see the broader system. What elements are contributing to the tensions? Our athlete recognized the strain on team dynamics and how unresolved conflict was impacting her.
Go Out: Take intentional action based on clarity and perspective. After Going In, and Going Up, we can identify leverage for change. She realized addressing the concern through a direct conversation would not only address the immediate issue but also strengthen her confidence in handling future conflicts.
This approach empowered her—and the entire team—to view challenges not as threats but as opportunities for growth. In the weeks since, she has consistently sought feedback, spoken truth, and encouraged our team to address what needs to be said. She has become a champion of antifragility, strengthening both our relationships and our performance.
Building a Culture of Resilience
As coaches, we realized we weren’t immune to fragility ourselves. By shielding the team from accountability and hard feedback, we were unintentionally contributing to their coddling. Adopting the mindset of antifragility challenged all of us to hold to account the behaviours of our players to our team values. Avoiding such conversations risked our culture shifting from one of truth and feedback and support, to one of silos and fear.
When I look to the next generation, I see incredible potential. Young people want to be strong; they don’t want to be fragile. But the well-intentioned patterns of coddling—from parents, educators, and institutions—are doing them a disservice. If we instead embrace conflict, adversity, and discomfort as tools for growth, we can equip ourselves and others to navigate life’s inevitable challenges with courage and resilience.
Conflict isn’t just something to survive—it’s something that can strengthen us. Tools like Go In, Go Up, Go Out, can reframe discomfort as a pathway to growth. The choice is ours: will we continue to avoid conflict, or will we embrace it as the foundation for antifragility and resilience?
Staying Curious,
Jodi