I think if you look up antifragile investment you find a lot of discussion of exactly this problem. As far as I understand, the idea is that most investments have limited downsides (at most, you lose what you put in) but may have limitless upsides in low-probability scenarios. Then you can make many small investments of this kind, so that when ones pays off, it’s more than enough to pay you back from the loss of the rest. Taking your example of the nuclear bunker, if you could build one with 1% of your wealth or less, in this frame of mind probably you should. Or less dramatically, invest a bit into any technology that could reach world-changing level even if it looks unlikely, plus buy a house as well as a cabin far away from any city. Learn a little bit of skills that could be useless or incredibly useful, depending on the future.
The answers you are suggesting are more related to safe/robust investment (I’m uncertain on the correct term), i.e. investment which should be useful whatever happens, but has a capped upside. Both maintain good health and buy a house count in this category. I’m not more qualified to give specific advice here than anyone else, but if you ask yourself “what would a standard prudent person do” you’re basically there.
Robust investment is what most people do in practice, and it’s probably a good thing because I think antifragile investment is too easy to screw up. But under some assumption on the nature of the high variance, which I think match the kind of future scenarios that you listed, well-thought antifragile strategies could be much better. At the very least, you can copy the idea of not putting all eggs in one basket, even if you don’t go all the way to make many small gambles in the expectation that at least one will pay off.
I think if you look up antifragile investment you find a lot of discussion of exactly this problem. As far as I understand, the idea is that most investments have limited downsides (at most, you lose what you put in) but may have limitless upsides in low-probability scenarios. Then you can make many small investments of this kind, so that when ones pays off, it’s more than enough to pay you back from the loss of the rest. Taking your example of the nuclear bunker, if you could build one with 1% of your wealth or less, in this frame of mind probably you should. Or less dramatically, invest a bit into any technology that could reach world-changing level even if it looks unlikely, plus buy a house as well as a cabin far away from any city. Learn a little bit of skills that could be useless or incredibly useful, depending on the future.
The answers you are suggesting are more related to safe/robust investment (I’m uncertain on the correct term), i.e. investment which should be useful whatever happens, but has a capped upside. Both maintain good health and buy a house count in this category. I’m not more qualified to give specific advice here than anyone else, but if you ask yourself “what would a standard prudent person do” you’re basically there.
Robust investment is what most people do in practice, and it’s probably a good thing because I think antifragile investment is too easy to screw up. But under some assumption on the nature of the high variance, which I think match the kind of future scenarios that you listed, well-thought antifragile strategies could be much better. At the very least, you can copy the idea of not putting all eggs in one basket, even if you don’t go all the way to make many small gambles in the expectation that at least one will pay off.