Preview: The Conch Paradox

Preface

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

I was running—absurdly underdressed in shorts and borrowed women's gloves—trying to outpace a decision that was already made. Forty-eight hours earlier, we'd been under the Aruban sun where doctors found the mass in our unborn son's chest. Now we stood in a Dutch hospital, having fought through bureaucratic barriers and crossed an ocean, facing a choice no parent should have to make.

The specialists had presented us with two paths: an invasive procedure that might help our son's lungs develop but carried grave risks of its own, or trust his body's natural capacity and accept profound uncertainty. After hours 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.

The bridge loomed in the winter darkness, its asymmetrical silhouette cutting through the night like a question mark. I'd crossed this bridge countless times as a graduate student two decades before, young and certain about how the world worked. Now it witnessed something breaking apart in me—or perhaps breaking open.

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. 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 fundamental 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 most profound vulnerabilities, and the wisdom required to know when to strengthen your defenses and when to risk transformation.

Because 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.

Rendell de Kort
Savaneta, Aruba
November 2025

Chapter 1: The Conch Paradox

This book is about a dangerous misconception that shapes how we respond to every threat we face—from medical emergencies to economic crises 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 counterintuitive: the adaptations that make us most resilient to familiar threats often leave us most vulnerable to novel ones. The shell that protects also constrains. The expertise that saves us in one crisis may blind us to the next. What we think of as our greatest strengths are often our most profound weaknesses.

I discovered this paradox on the Erasmus Bridge in Rotterdam, during the darkest night of my family's life, when the decision to save my son's life required surrendering control of it entirely. That moment of surrender—standing before a mural of a mother holding her child, finally releasing everything I'd been trying to control—unlocked something I'd been studying professionally but had never truly understood.

The Paradox Revealed

What I didn't realize that night was that I was literally running across the perfect metaphor for what I'd spent years studying professionally: the resilience paradox.

The Erasmus Bridge itself embodies this paradox. Engineers designed it to work with Rotterdam's powerful forces—wind, water, ship traffic—rather than rigidly resisting them. The bridge moves, flexes, adapts. What does it mean that a structure which appears vulnerable—which deliberately yields to pressure—proves more durable than rigid strength?

Rotterdam understood this principle because it had no choice. The city was destroyed during World War II, rebuilt from rubble, and then had to continuously adapt to rising sea levels and changing economic realities. Unlike cities that could afford to preserve historic structures and resist change, Rotterdam became a laboratory for adaptive design.

Perhaps there's a strange gift in devastation: when you have nothing left to preserve, transformation becomes possible.

The same pattern appears in nature. The queen conch, a marine mollusk native to Caribbean waters, has survived virtually unchanged for millions of years. Its shell represents one of nature's most sophisticated protective structures: a three-tiered composite that dissipates force, contains cracks, and withstands tremendous pressure. This magnificent armor—with its distinctive pink interior and protective spines—made the conch nearly invincible against its traditional predators.

Yet today, despite this evolutionary masterpiece, the species faces extinction. Warming oceans, habitat degradation, and industrial fishing present entirely different challenges than ancient predators. The shell that protected against one type of threat offers no defense against these novel dangers.

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

The Resilience Industrial Complex

Somewhere along the way, "resilience" became the answer to everything.

Can't handle climate change? Build resilience. Economic crisis looming? Develop resilience capacity. Struggling with work-life balance? You need personal resilience. The word has been so thoroughly drained of meaning that it now means everything and nothing simultaneously.

Organizations hire Chief Resilience Officers. Consultants sell resilience frameworks. Universities offer resilience certificates. Government agencies fund resilience programs. 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 all 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 how to build better versions of what they already have. It's comfortable because it doesn't require questioning your fundamental approach. You can purchase resilience assessments, implement resilience frameworks, and measure resilience metrics—all without actually transforming anything about how you operate.

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 Pattern Everywhere

Once you see the paradox, you recognize it everywhere. Or perhaps, once you stop looking away, you finally see what was always there.

Island economies specialize in tourism because they lack the scale for diverse manufacturing. This specialization brings prosperity—until a pandemic shuts down international travel and exposes the vulnerability created by that very focus. The economic strategy that built wealth has simultaneously created fragility.

Medical systems optimize for efficiency and routine care, eliminating slack capacity and standardizing protocols. This works beautifully under normal conditions—until a novel virus arrives and the system's specialized efficiency becomes its greatest weakness. What looked like waste turns out to be essential for handling the unexpected.

Marriages develop comfortable patterns and unspoken expectations, creating stability through predictability. But when crisis hits, those same patterns can become rigid constraints that prevent the adaptation required for survival. What if the protective routines that make a relationship feel secure are exactly what prevent it from evolving when evolution becomes necessary?

Companies invest deeply in core competencies, building competitive advantages through specialization. Then the market shifts, and those same deep investments become sunk costs that prevent pivoting to new opportunities. The expertise that created success becomes the anchor that prevents transformation.

In each case, the adaptation that created resilience against familiar challenges has simultaneously created vulnerability to novel ones. The shell protects and constrains.

Perhaps strength and weakness aren't opposites at all. Perhaps they're two faces of the same choice.