In the 1960s, Broadway actors had a rule of thumb about new plays. They would gather at Lindy’s Delicatessen in Manhattan, order cheesecake, and place bets on how long a show would run. The heuristic was simple: a play that had already survived a hundred performances would probably survive a hundred more. A play limping through its second week was already dead — it just didn’t know it yet.
The actors were doing statistics without knowing it. Their deli-counter rule had a real mathematical backbone, and it applies far beyond Broadway: the future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing is proportional to its current age. A book in print for fifty years will probably stay in print for fifty more. A technology used for a decade will probably last another decade. The older something is, the longer it is likely to keep going.
This is the Lindy effect, named after the deli where actors first noticed it. The writer Albert Goldman coined the term in 1964 after hearing the actors’ rule. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot — the fractals pioneer — gave it formal treatment. And Nassim Nicholas Taleb popularized it in Antifragile, turning a Broadway betting heuristic into one of the most useful mental models for navigating a novelty-obsessed world.
Why survival is evidence
The logic is disarmingly simple. Every day a thing survives is a day it withstood everything the world threw at it: competitors, changing tastes, accidents, bad luck. Fragile things die young — most new restaurants close within years, most apps vanish from the store, most fads evaporate by next season. So the mere fact that something is old means it has already passed a brutal, silent exam that killed nearly all of its contemporaries.
Think of it as a filter. A two-month-old productivity app has survived almost nothing; the world hasn’t had time to test it. A forty-year-old novel has survived wars, regimes, translations, and the arrival of television, the internet, and the smartphone — and people still read it. Age, for things that don’t physically decay, is not a weakness. It is a track record.
The crucial exception: perishable things
The Lindy effect comes with a giant flashing boundary, and Taleb is explicit about it: it applies to the non-perishable — ideas, books, technologies, institutions, practices. It does not apply to the perishable: humans, animals, food, individual machines with wearing parts.
For perishable things, the logic reverses. A ninety-year-old man is not expected to live ninety more years; he is expected to live a few. A car with 300,000 kilometers on it is closer to the scrapyard, not further from it. If someone quotes Lindy to argue that an aging dictator, an old dog, or a carton of milk has ages left in it, they have the rule exactly backwards.
The test is one question: does this thing decay on its own? If yes — perishable, Lindy does not apply. If no — an idea, a text, a technique — every year survived is evidence of years to come.
How to actually use it
Lindy is a decision tool disguised as a curiosity. Use it wherever novelty competes with staying power:
Reading. Prefer books that are older than you. A new bestseller has survived nothing; a book still read after a century has survived everything. This doesn’t mean never read new books — it means demanding more evidence before spending ten hours on one.
Technology. Boring, decade-old tools (email, plain text, the command line) will probably outlive this year’s shiny platform. Before rebuilding your life around a new app, ask how many of its predecessors survived.
Habits and advice. Diets and productivity systems that are two years old are experiments. Ones embedded in cultures for centuries — walking, fasting, cooking at home — have passed the only trial that matters: time.
But keep the caveats in view. Lindy is about probabilities, not guarantees — plenty of old things do die. It suffers from survivorship bias by construction: we see the survivors, not the graveyard. It is no excuse for stagnation. “We’ve always done it this way” is the lazy cousin of the Lindy effect, not the effect itself. Lindy tells you what is likely to endure; human judgment still has to decide what should.
The one thing to remember
New things have to prove themselves. Old, non-perishable things already have. When in doubt, bet with time, not against it: what has lasted will probably keep lasting.