August 30, 2026
Reflection:
It’s been a packed week but a good one. This weekend, I was catching up on various posts and correspondence and saw this from Anab Jain:
“I’ve been thinking about Olivier Hamant's idea of robustness vs resilience. For resilience you need to get knocked down over and over again and become better at getting back up. Robustness is more about remaining viable in conditions that fluctuate, keeping some capacity to respond, to stay open, to make sense of what is happening around us.”
I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Hamant is a biophysicist, and he contrasts robustness to performance and to our current obsession with efficiency and optimization. In biological systems, optimization leads to brittleness or fragility, and what we want instead is a system that can adapt, which requires a certain level of inefficiency and redundancy. Anab’s framing approaches this from another angle: Resilience is learned through a series of stressors, whereas robustness is a sort of flexibility of mind or system.
I hadn’t encountered Hamant before and would like to read or listen to more of his work.
Reading:
- I’ve mostly been listening to procedurals while driving — engaging enough for a drive but not complex enough to require concentration.
