Rare Things Feel Impossible Until The Day They Happen

Our sense of the possible is built from what we have personally seen.

The imagination runs on memory, so anything absent from memory feels not merely unlikely but unreal. A flood that has not occurred in a lifetime is treated as a story rather than a possibility. A failure that has never happened to this system is treated as a failure that cannot happen to this system. Then it happens, and within hours everyone is describing it as obvious in hindsight, which is another sign that the problem was never information. The information was usually available. What was missing was any felt sense that the thing could occur, because nobody present had lived through it.

Rarity compounds this. An event that occurs seldom will, over long stretches, be absent from most people's direct experience, and each year of absence quietly strengthens the belief that it will stay absent. Preparations that were made after the last one get relaxed. The seldom becomes the never. And because it is genuinely uncommon, the belief is right almost every time it is tested, right up until the once when it is catastrophically wrong.

The counterweight is to take institutional memory seriously and to treat your own experience as the small sample it is. Records, old plans and the accounts of people who were there are worth more than intuition here, precisely because intuition has nothing to work with. Ask what this place has seen before you arrived, and assume the list is not finished.