Preview: The Conch Paradox

Preface

This book was born on the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, on a freezing winter night when I finally surrendered.

Forty-eight hours earlier, we'd been under the Aruban sun when our unborn son was diagnosed with a life-threatening diaphragmatic hernia. Now we stood in a Dutch hospital, having fought through bureaucratic barriers and crossed an ocean for experimental surgery that might save him, facing a choice no parent should have to make.

The specialists had presented us with impossible choices: an invasive procedure that could help his lungs develop but carried grave risks of its own, or trust his body's natural capacity and accept deep uncertainty. After an intense hour of deliberation, weighing probabilities and outcomes, we chose to let go. To stop trying to control what we couldn't control.

That's when I ran.

Back at the hotel, my wife Lay needed rest. I needed to move. The Erasmus Bridge loomed in the winter darkness, Rotterdam's iconic "Swan" rising against the frozen sky. This massive structure had challenged me as a university student two decades before, young and certain about how the world worked. Now it witnessed something breaking apart in me. Or perhaps breaking open.

With each stride across the bridge's span, I felt the dual forces of hope and terror pulling me in opposite directions. As I reached the other side, breath clouding in the frigid air, I looked up at my old apartment building. A massive mural now adorned its wall: a mother holding her infant child.

I broke. Standing there in the cold, staring at that image, all the fear I'd been carrying, all the desperate attempts to analyze and control our way to safety, it poured out of me. I cried in a way I hadn't since childhood, my body finally releasing what my mind could no longer hold. This wasn't an intellectual revelation, but a moment of surrender. Exhausted beyond measure, emptied of everything, I felt something emerge from somewhere deeper than thought: It's going to be OK.

I had no evidence for this. No data. No analysis. Just surrender, and in that surrender, an unexpected peace that felt more true than any calculation I'd ever made.

What I didn't understand then was that this moment would reshape everything I thought I knew. Not just about my son's survival, but about the nature of resilience itself. The patterns I'd been studying professionally for years as an economist researching Small Island Developing States suddenly became intimate and personal. The data came alive.

This book weaves together three journeys: my family's medical crisis in Rotterdam, my research into how small islands navigate perpetual vulnerability, and a personal transformation I never saw coming. It's about a dangerous misconception that shapes how we respond to every threat we face, from medical emergencies to economic collapse to climate change. We believe that building stronger defenses makes us safer. We assume that specialized protection reduces vulnerability.

We're wrong.

The truth is far more unsettling: the very adaptations that make us most resilient to familiar threats often leave us most vulnerable to novel ones. I discovered this truth watching my son fight for life in a Rotterdam hospital, but the pattern appears everywhere, in Caribbean ecosystems and island economies, in medical systems and marriages, in the protective shells we all build around ourselves.

I've changed some details to protect privacy and illuminate larger truths. The core story, and the paradox it reveals, remains faithful to what we lived.

My hope is that by exploring resilience through both intimate crisis and professional research, you'll recognize your own paradoxes. The places where your greatest strengths have become your deepest vulnerabilities, and the wisdom required to know when to strengthen your defenses and when to risk transformation.

This is the story of how I learned that lesson, and what it might mean for all of us navigating an uncertain world.

Rendell de Kort
Savaneta, Aruba
November 2025

Chapter 1: The Conch Paradox

The Erasmus Bridge stretched before me in the frozen Dutch night, its asymmetrical silhouette cutting through the darkness like a question mark against the stars. I was dressed absurdly for a January night in Rotterdam, shorts and borrowed women's gloves, walking back to our hotel after what I can only describe as a breakdown. Exhausted beyond measure. Emptied of everything.

Just forty-eight hours earlier, we had been under the Aruban sun. Now my wife and I were navigating a foreign medical system, our unborn son's life hanging on decisions no parent should have to make. That evening, we had chosen to forgo experimental surgery and trust his body to heal itself, a surrender that felt like either wisdom or failure, depending on which hour of the night you asked me.

My mind, desperate for refuge from the terror, wandered to familiar territory: my PhD research. This was my instinct when threatened: retreat into analysis. Seal the entrance. Let the mind work while the heart hides.

Something was crystallizing in the cold, though I couldn't yet name it.

The cockroach and the conch

Months earlier, before any of this began, I'd submitted my first PhD outline on economic resilience in Small Island Developing States. I'd been so proud of it. The queen conch, with its remarkable three-layered shell structure that could withstand tremendous pressure, dissipate force, and contain damage, seemed like the perfect metaphor. Materials scientists studied it. Engineers tried to replicate it. Taking something from the local Caribbean context as a symbol for resilience? I thought it was brilliant.

My supervisors demolished it.

My first supervisor, playing good cop as usual, had been gentle: "Well, maybe you can just mention the conch in the introduction, but let's not talk about that right now. Let's focus on the serious content."

My second supervisor, with the Dutch directness that could feel like a punch to the gut, was more blunt: "OK, using a metaphor is cute. But I don't feel it's working at all. First of all, why are we using a conch as an ideal for resilience? If I'm not mistaken, it's an endangered species, so doesn't sound very resilient to me. If you're looking for a resilient creature, shouldn't we be looking at a cockroach instead?"

A cockroach instead of a conch.

I'd tried to salvage something: "So I just leave that little bit there in the introduction... and maybe the conch lives to fight another day?"

On the webcam, I'd seen him smirk as he agreed that we would proceed like that.

Now, in the frozen Dutch night, those dismissive words began to transform. My supervisor had been right, though not in the way he'd intended.

The queen conch was endangered. Despite its perfect shell. Because of its perfect shell. The very specialization that had protected it for millennia now prevented it from adapting to warming oceans and industrial fishing. The shell that made it resilient to sharks left it vulnerable to unprecedented change.

This was the paradox: perfect adaptation to current conditions creates brittleness when tomorrow's challenges emerge.

I glimpsed this truth that night but couldn't yet articulate it. It wasn't until more than a year later, after returning to Aruba, that I scheduled another call with my supervisors.

"What if," I asked them, "it's possible to be resilient and vulnerable at the same time? The conch is resilient to shark attacks but vulnerable to global warming. Maybe that's not a weakness in the metaphor. Maybe that's the point."

Through the webcam, I watched their expressions shift. My second supervisor's face changed, not quite a smile, but something close.

"Ha," he said. "That's interesting. That does change things. It's not a crazy thought."

In that moment, something shifted. More than academic validation: confidence in what I'd discovered through crisis. The paradox was real.

The pattern revealed

The parallel between our family's medical journey and the islands I study became impossible to ignore.

For my son, the resilience measures were medical: feeding tubes that ensured nutrition when he couldn't swallow safely, oxygen monitors that tracked his fragile respiratory system, specialized care protocols that required Rotterdam's expertise. These interventions were saving his life. But they were also creating new dependencies, equipment we couldn't maintain in Aruba, expertise that didn't exist on our island, care routines that would make returning home feel impossible.

The pattern was consistent across every domain I examined. It wasn't about any individual decision being wrong. It was about how optimization for known threats systematically creates exposure to novel ones. Protection creating constraint. Strength becoming weakness when the rules change.

The resilience industrial complex

I have a confession to make: I was part of the problem before I understood what the problem was.

When I first began working with the World Bank as a consultant, I learned quickly which words opened doors. A colleague reviewing one of my early reports suggested adding "resilience" to the title. It sounded right. It was the language that mattered in development circles, the word that made projects fundable, that signaled seriousness, that nobody would question.

So I used it. I added "resilience" to reports without being entirely sure what I meant by it. Early warning systems? Resilience. Emergency relief? Resilience. Long-term capacity building? Also resilience. The word worked. It just didn't mean anything I could defend.

The discomfort grew when I started lecturing to university students. Inevitably, economic resilience would appear on my slides. And I would find myself saying something like: "Resilience is the capacity to bounce back after a shock." The words came out smoothly enough. But I dreaded the follow-up question. What does bouncing back actually mean? Back to what? And what if "back" is the problem?

No student ever pressed me. Maybe they sensed my uncertainty. Maybe they were writing down the definition for the exam and moving on. I knew I was mumbling through something I didn't understand, using language that sounded sophisticated while hoping nobody would notice it was hollow.

This unease is what eventually drove me to study resilience seriously. I needed to understand what I'd been selling.

What I discovered was a self-perpetuating system I came to think of as the "resilience industrial complex." Organizations hire Chief Resilience Officers. Consultants sell resilience frameworks. Universities offer resilience certificates. Everyone is building resilience. No one can quite define what it means.

Here's what it usually means in practice: bounce back to normal as quickly as possible. Build higher seawalls. Develop faster recovery protocols. Add more redundancy to critical systems. These aren't wrong, exactly. But they assume the future will look like the past, just with bigger waves.

This is the resilience industrial complex: a self-perpetuating system where experts profit from teaching organizations to build better versions of what they already have. It's comfortable because it doesn't require questioning your core approach. You can purchase resilience assessments, implement resilience frameworks, measure resilience metrics, all without transforming anything about how you operate.

Nassim Taleb exposed part of this problem. His Black Swan revealed how spectacularly we fail at predicting the rare events that reshape everything, the outliers our models systematically miss. The conch paradox addresses something different. The problem isn't only that we can't predict black swans. It's that our successful adaptations to yesterday's challenges become tomorrow's constraints. The conch didn't fail to predict warming oceans. It simply couldn't stop being a conch.

The dead-end problem

There's something even more troubling than the assumption that tomorrow will resemble today. The resilience discourse has a fatal blind spot: it focuses entirely on how well you can absorb shocks while traveling your current path. It never asks whether the path itself leads somewhere worth going.

Economists call this path-dependency, the way past choices constrain future options until alternatives become nearly impossible to pursue. Each investment in your current approach makes it harder to change direction. Each success reinforces the trajectory. The better you get at what you do, the more difficult it becomes to do anything else.

Consider Aruba's tourism economy. For decades, we made rational choices: build more hotels, train more hospitality workers, expand airport capacity, market our beaches to the world. Each decision made sense. Each success funded the next investment. We became extraordinarily good at welcoming visitors.

Here's what nobody discussed: with every hotel built, we became less capable of being anything other than a tourism destination. The expertise we developed was hospitality expertise. The infrastructure we constructed served visitors. The education system trained the next generation for the same industry. We weren't just choosing tourism. We were foreclosing alternatives.

But I need to complicate my own narrative here. Presenting Aruba's tourism concentration as strategic choice, as rational decisions accumulating into dependency, tells a cleaner story than reality permits.

The truth is messier. When our oil refinery closed in 1985, there was no grand deliberation, no stakeholder consultations weighing alternative futures. There was fiscal panic. The government needed revenue. The central bank needed foreign exchange. Tourism wasn't chosen through careful resilience analysis; it was the only option that could generate money fast enough to keep the lights on.

An economist colleague who has spent decades advising Caribbean governments once put it bluntly: "You're describing path dependency as if it's about tourism. It's not. It's about public finance." He's right, and the implications run deeper than I initially understood. Chronic fiscal stress doesn't just constrain choices; it makes strategic thinking itself nearly impossible. I'll return to this insight later, when I examine how institutions become trapped in their own protective shells.

When COVID-19 grounded international flights, we discovered we had spent decades becoming resilient to everything except the one thing that actually happened. We could weather hurricanes, financial crises, regional instability. We had proven this repeatedly. What we couldn't survive was the disappearance of tourists themselves. Our resilience had been path-dependent: extraordinarily robust along one trajectory, catastrophically fragile if that trajectory was blocked.

The most insidious form of resilience is the capacity to persist on an unsustainable path. You can be perfectly resilient heading toward a cliff. The question conventional frameworks never ask is: resilient toward what end?

The conch has been perfecting its shell for millions of years. By any conventional measure of resilience, it succeeded brilliantly, right up until the moment the definition of success changed entirely. The threat wasn't bigger predators requiring thicker armor. The threat was a transformation of the environment that made the entire armor strategy irrelevant.

Sometimes the shell itself is the problem. And sometimes the problem is that you've traveled so far down one path that you can no longer see the others.

The deeper dimension

But there's something beyond structural vulnerability and path-dependency that I didn't fully grasp until much later, though I had been living it from the first night on that bridge. It concerns the shell we build and what we do when we feel threatened.

When a predator approaches, the conch's instinct is retreat and fortification, withdrawing deep into its spiral chamber and sealing the entrance with its operculum, that hard, claw-like plate that fits the opening perfectly. Against a shark or an octopus, this works brilliantly. The predator can't reach the vulnerable organism tucked inside. The conch waits, sealed and safe, until danger passes.

But anyone who has grown up in the Caribbean knows what happens next. The fisherman wading through shallow water doesn't need to defeat the conch's defenses. He simply picks up the sealed shell and carries it to shore. Later, at his convenience, he'll punch a hole through the spiral, right where the muscle attaches, and extract the animal completely. The conch's perfect sealing behavior, so effective against natural predators, becomes its doom against a threat it never evolved to recognize. By sealing itself in, it guaranteed its own capture. It couldn't flee because it was too busy fortifying.

This is the deeper lesson: we don't just have shells; we retreat into them when threatened. And sometimes that instinct, so effective against familiar dangers, leaves us trapped and helpless when the nature of the threat changes.

The conch paradox has three dimensions. The first is structural: every protective adaptation creates new vulnerabilities. The second is directional: you can be perfectly resilient while heading toward disaster. The third is behavioral: when we feel threatened, we instinctively retreat into whatever shell we've built, even when that retreat guarantees our capture rather than our safety.

Can perfection itself become a trap? Can the very adaptations that ensure survival in one era guarantee extinction in another?

These questions would haunt the months ahead as we navigated systems designed to protect but built to constrain.

What follows

This book won't offer a simple prescription. The lesson isn't to abandon protection entirely or to embrace perpetual vulnerability. That would be as reductive as the "build back better" mantras I'm critiquing.

The challenge is subtler: recognizing when our protective strategies are hardening into constraints, when our chosen path is foreclosing alternatives, and finding the courage to transform before transformation is forced upon us. Sometimes surrender isn't defeat but strategic flexibility. Sometimes the wisest protection feels like letting go.

I learned this in a Rotterdam hospital watching my son fight for life, discovering that the same systems saving him were creating dependencies we'd struggle to escape.

That experience taught me something the resilience frameworks never captured: the future won't look like the past, no matter how perfectly we've adapted to present conditions. And sometimes the only way forward is to let go of everything you've built and trust that you'll discover what you need when you need it.