The label on the package should say please mishandle
Nassim Nicholas Taleb noticed that no language has a word for the opposite of fragile, so he invented one, and it isn't strong.
Ship a package marked FRAGILE and you protect it from shocks. Ship one marked ROBUST and shocks don't touch it either way — it comes through unchanged. Neither label describes something that gets better from being knocked around. Taleb went looking for that word and found nothing, in any language, so in Antifragile (2012) he made one up: antifragile.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A ceramic mug is fragile — drop it, it shatters. A rubber ball is robust — drop it, it bounces back identical. But your immune system, hit with a mild pathogen, comes out stronger than before. Muscle, stressed by lifting, doesn't just recover; it grows. That's the third category, and it's not the same as resilience — resilience survives the storm, antifragility needs the storm.
Taleb's target was systems built to look stable while quietly removing the very stress that would have taught them anything: banks that eliminate small failures until one failure is catastrophic, bureaucracies optimized until a single shock breaks them completely.
The safest-looking systems are often just the ones that haven't been tested yet.