You’ve seen the headlines. A massive tech outage shuts down global airlines because of one bad line of code. A "thousand-year flood" destroys a town that hasn't seen a drop of rain in months. Or maybe it’s personal—the healthy marathon runner who suddenly has a heart attack. We spend most of our lives operating under the assumption that the status quo is a permanent fixture of reality. We assume the bridge will hold. We assume the bank will open. We assume the internet will work when we wake up. But yes it can happen, and history is littered with the debris of things people said were impossible right up until the second they occurred.
Statistical anomalies aren't just math problems. They are life-altering events.
The human brain is actually hardwired to suck at this. Evolutionarily, we are optimized to spot immediate threats—the rustle in the grass that might be a predator. We aren't great at conceptualizing the "Black Swan," a term popularized by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. A Black Swan is an event that is an outlier, carries an extreme impact, and is explained away after the fact as if it were predictable. It wasn't. But the realization that yes it can happen usually only arrives when the water is already in the living room.
The Normalcy Bias Trap
Most of us suffer from normalcy bias. It’s a psychological state where we underestimate the possibility of a disaster and its potential effects. This is why people stay in their homes during hurricane warnings. They think, "It’s never been that bad before," or "The last five warnings were duds."
It’s a survival mechanism that keeps us from living in a state of constant, paralyzing anxiety. If you spent every waking second thinking about the 400 ways a solar flare could fry the power grid, you wouldn’t get much done. But this mental cushion becomes a liability when the outlier finally shows up.
Take the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. Engineers had built seawalls based on historical data. They looked at the past and said, "A 19-foot wave is the max." Then a 43-foot wave hit. The math was right based on the recorded history, but nature doesn't care about our record books. It was a stark reminder that just because something hasn't happened in 100 years doesn't mean it won't happen tomorrow. Yes it can happen, even if the spreadsheet says the odds are 0.001%.
When Systems Fail All at Once
Complexity is the enemy of stability. As our world becomes more interconnected, the "cascading failure" becomes our biggest threat. Think about the 2024 CrowdStrike outage. One single update to a security sensor crashed millions of Windows machines worldwide. Hospitals couldn't perform surgeries. People were stranded in airports for days.
It felt like a movie plot.
But it was just a byproduct of a fragile, interconnected ecosystem. We trade resiliency for efficiency every single day. We use "Just-In-Time" manufacturing because it’s cheaper, but if one shipping lane in the Red Sea gets blocked, the whole world stops getting car parts.
Honestly, we’re living in a giant game of Jenga. We keep pulling blocks from the bottom to build the tower higher. We’re shocked when it wobbles. Why? Because we’ve convinced ourselves that the tower is a solid object rather than a collection of precariously balanced pieces.
Why Logic Fails in the Face of the Unthinkable
- We rely too much on "Mean" or "Average" data.
- We ignore "Fat Tail" risks—events that are rare but have massive consequences.
- Confirmation bias makes us look for info that says "everything is fine."
- Groupthink in corporate boardrooms silences the person asking "What if?"
The Personal Side of "Yes It Can Happen"
It’s not just about global catastrophes or tech meltdowns. This happens in our backyards.
I knew a guy who never bought disability insurance. He was 32, worked a desk job, and went to the gym four times a week. He thought insurance was a scam for people who weren't careful. Then he got hit by a distracted driver while crossing the street. Six months of physical therapy and a mountain of medical bills later, his perspective changed.
The "it won't happen to me" mindset is a luxury of the lucky.
We see this in the housing market, too. In 2008, the prevailing wisdom was that "home prices always go up." People took out adjustable-rate mortgages they couldn't afford because they figured they could always refinance. The systemic collapse of the mortgage-backed security market was unthinkable to the average buyer. Until it wasn't.
How to Build a "Yes It Can Happen" Mindset
So, how do you live without being a doomsday prepper but also without being a naive target? You start by building redundancy.
In engineering, redundancy is the duplication of critical components. If one fails, the system keeps running. In your life, this looks like having a "Plan B" that doesn't rely on the same infrastructure as "Plan A."
If all your money is in one bank, and that bank’s app goes down, you are broke. If all your work files are on one cloud service and you lose access, you are unemployed.
- The Cash Reserve: It sounds old-school, but having physical cash in a safe at home is the ultimate hedge against a digital outage.
- Diversified Skills: Don't just be "the guy who knows how to use this one specific software." If that software becomes obsolete or the company folds, what else can you do?
- Emergency Basics: You don't need a bunker. But you should have three days of water and food. Most people don't. They assume the grocery store is an infinite resource.
Acknowledging the Limits of Expertise
We have to be honest: experts are often the last people to see these things coming. Expertise is built on the study of the past. By definition, a breakthrough or a breakdown is something that deviates from the past.
During the 2020 pandemic, the "experts" were constantly playing catch-up. Not because they were incompetent, but because the situation was evolving faster than the data could be peer-reviewed. We saw in real-time how "it can't happen here" turned into "it's happening everywhere" in the span of three weeks.
We have to stop treating "unlikely" as "impossible."
If someone tells you there is a 1% chance of something happening, you shouldn't hear "0%." You should hear "If I do this 100 times, I'm definitely going to deal with this once."
Actionable Steps for the Uncertain
Stop waiting for a sign. If you’ve been putting off something—whether it’s a backup of your wedding photos, a health checkup, or an emergency fund—do it now.
- Audit your single points of failure. Look at your life. If one thing breaks (your car, your phone, your main client), does everything else fall apart? If the answer is yes, fix that link first.
- Practice "Pre-Mortems." Before starting a project or a new phase of life, imagine it has already failed. Now, ask yourself: Why did it fail? This helps you spot the "yes it can happen" scenarios before they actually manifest.
- Limit your debt. Debt is a bet on the future being stable. The less debt you have, the more "anti-fragile" you become. You can handle a job loss or a market dip much better when you don't owe the bank every penny you make.
- Invest in "Low-Tech" backups. Have a paper map of your city. Keep a landline if you live in a disaster-prone area. Know how to start a fire. These seem like hobbyist skills until they are survival skills.
The world is chaotic. It always has been. The period of relative stability we’ve enjoyed over the last few decades is the anomaly, not the rule. Accepting that yes it can happen isn't about being pessimistic. It’s about being prepared enough that when the "impossible" occurs, you’re the one who is ready to move while everyone else is still standing there in shock.
Build your life to be resilient. Diversify your dependencies. Keep your eyes open to the fact that the floor can drop out at any time, and you’ll find that you actually worry less because you’ve already accounted for the "what if."
