We judge the likelihood of an event by how easily we can recall examples of it. Because we can easily recall a plane crash (which is highly publicized) but cannot easily recall a death from a car accident or a silent pandemic (which is mundane), we fear the wrong things. The truly unthinkable event, by definition, has no recent precedent. We cannot recall it, so we assign it a probability of zero.
Experts often fail to predict the scale of disasters, leading to reactive rather than proactive management. Strategic Silence:
Nassim Nicholas Taleb famously described Black Swans—high-impact, rare, and retrospectively predictable events. Note the word retrospectively . After 9/11, everyone said, "Of course, it was obvious." After the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, geologists pointed out the decades of warning signs. But before the event, anyone who suggested the scenario was labeled a paranoid conspiracy theorist. The unthinkable is the cost of doing business in a complex world. Unthinkable
The current landscape is characterized by a "dangerous cocktail" of converging threats. The Normalization of the Abnormal:
We suffer from a triumvirate of cognitive biases that specifically filter out unthinkable scenarios: We judge the likelihood of an event by
You realize that the only thing the unthinkable cannot take from you is the choice of how to respond in the last five minutes. Viktor Frankl wrote about this in the unthinkable hell of the concentration camps: "Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances."
The unthinkable is not our enemy. Denial is our enemy. The unthinkable is merely the final exam of reality. It strips away the trivial. It reveals who actually knows how to tie a knot, who has actually told their children they love them, and who has actually built something real instead of just scrolling. We cannot recall it, so we assign it a probability of zero
The point where a person finally takes action to survive.