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“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men Couldn’t put Humpty together again.” — English nursery rhyme
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Our planet is burning, and so are we.
Scientists are telling us our world is becoming more unpredictable and our politicians are sounding more and more insane. While they look for people to blame for their failures and insist we do the same, they are handing over power and wealth to the tech oligarchs who are gutting our democracies, and making us believe we need more efficiency, better performance, and become more resilient.
Everything needs to be optimised: our work, our consumption, our bodies, our relationships. We are obsessed with performance, impact, key performance indicators (KPIs). There’s an app for everything. And we need data centres in our cities so that we can do everything faster: buy faster, post faster, be angry faster. This obsession with performance, biologist Olivier Hamant warns, is what will end up killing us.
Our world has reached a level of delirious performance, he says, what we have is “the synchrony of crises with the diachrony of perceptions,” all the crises humanity is facing are interlinked but we perceive them differently.
In a world of performance, sociopaths are in charge. Our performance is a war on life. A performative world has lost its sensuousness.
In Antidote to the cult of performance, Hamant explains how any system or organisation that is overly-optimised becomes extremely fragile, “always. It’s a systemic rule … it’s true for a star, it’s true for an anthill, it’s true for human societies.” By framing his research into ecosystems, he argues that instead of performance, we need to develop robustness. Robustness is the capacity of a system to maintain its stability, and in the long term, its viability, despite fluctuations.
For millions of years, living beings have always lived in a fluctuating world and what dominates is symbiosis, species cooperate. In Darwin’s Origin of Species, which continues to be misread and misinterpreted, evolution does not select the most fit or the most efficient, it is the most adaptable that survive, the most robust.
Performance is secondary. “Natural ecosystems are robust before they are performative,” Hamant explains. “What we have built is the opposite, performance before robustness. Our world is designed to fail.” (Think of the Strait of Hormuz, CrowdStrike, COVID).
One way to look at it, he says, is to think of the lion. We only see the performant hunter, but the lion sleeps 16 to 20 hours a day. We are trying to make the planet, and ourselves, be performant 24 hours a day. “When we reduce the lion to a hunter, we are biased by the pro-performance. Constant performance generates planetary burnout, burnout for humans, burnout for public services, burnout for ecosystems.”
An essential element for robustness is diversity. Diversity is a shield, the species that are collective and that help each other are the ones that survive. We have built monocultures, and monocultures eventually attract a pathogen and will die. When you become highly optimised, you become nothing more than an extractive machine. Like the parasites that attach to a shark’s body, where it evolved to become a mere digestive tract. And when a crisis hits, when the host on which you live dies, everything collapses. We are becoming parasites.
We are also the only species that have created non-circular systems. Yet everything in life is circular. Our economy doesn’t need to be an economy of production, it can be an economy of sharing, of cooperation, functionality, where we produce fewer goods that are more robust, repairable, adaptable, shareable.
It’s the same with competition, the only competition we need is between the firemen and the fire. But the rest of the time, we have to be robust. The corporate world excels at convincing us that competition leads to innovation, but, Hamant argues, if you use competition to innovate, by definition, you will only have the space that the competitors leave you, so it’s a small space, that’s all the gadgets we see. And it’s a closed space, there are patents. Innovation can be at the service of robustness and it can be open.
What does it mean for us to be robust?
We hear calls for people to become resilient, which essentially means that when you fall, you bounce back. Some are suggesting we need to develop anti-fragility, which means when you fall, you bounce back, but bounce back higher. This can be a dystopian model, Hamant suggests, because you would have to repeatedly fall or take a beating to improve. And resilience absolves responsibility and romanticises trauma.
Robustness means you create the conditions in which you don’t fall. So it’s much more positive. Resilience and anti-fragility are trajectories. Robustness is a space, a space of viability, it’s more free, because you can increase, decrease, oscillate, it’s much more positive.
Being comfortable makes us less robust. A psychologically robust human is someone who likes to improvise, someone who is not in control. Jazz is robust. A virtuoso who only does one thing well is not robust. So we should not specialise but learn different skills.
For Hamant, we should treat this world addicted to performance like a cult. And if you want people to realise they are in a cult, you don’t use rational arguments, you have to put a bug in the system. It can be creating a moment of arrest, something that derails them. Burnout is a bug, he says, although not a joyful one. Artists can help us here, they can disturb our comfort, our perspective.
There is good news though, he insists, with authoritarianism, with billionaires and now trillionaire, and the delirious centralisation of power, whether in the tech world or media ownership, it’s reaching its limit. It has become extremely fragile and will eventually collapse. In parallel, we are already seeing many initiatives to create more robust societies. With circularity, diversity and robustness, we can be prepared for a century of uncertainty and fluctuations, with joy, because it’s much more joyful to live like this.
Words, Veronica Yates and illustration, Miriam Sugranyes
References
Humpty Dumpty. James William Elliott’s National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs. From wikipedia, see here.
Antidote to the cult of performance. Robustness from nature, Olivier Hamant.
‘The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile.’ The Great Simplification Podcast, Ep 230, with Olivier Hamant, 5 August 2026. Listen here.
‘S’inspirer de la Nature pour Vivre dans un Monde Incertain - Olivier Hamant.’ Circular Metabolism Podcast, 14 February 2025. Listen here.
‘When Resilience Becomes a Burden: Reflections from Gazan Palestinian Scholars.’ Khalid Dader, Malaka Shwaikh, Hala Shoman & Saga Hamdan. Journal of Palestine Studies, 18 Sep 2025. View here.
Further Resources
Through the Looking-Glass, Lewis Carroll.
Sensuous Knowledge, Minna Salami.
The Burnout Society, Byung Chul Han.
‘The rise of end times fascism, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor,’ The Guardian, 13 April 2025. Read here. (Watch out for their book by the same title, coming out soon!)
Revolutionary Suicide, Huey P. Newton.
Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, Charles Perrow.
Theory of Immediate World Revolution: A Handbook for the Avant-Garde, Marcel Mariën.
“Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil. … Acceptance of the lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such.” — Hannah Arendt
“The act of engaging in free-improvisation will become a liberator, and emancipator, for many people to touch into their emotional lives in a non-verbal and non-judgemental way. We must introduce this healthy way of life.”— LaDonna Smith
“Centuries of philosophical inquiry have failed to result in agreement about what the ‘good life’ is.” — Ruut Veenhoven
Archimedes: ”Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.” Chinua Achebe: “But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.”
