Much of what we call catastrophe is of our own making. We create the conditions, ignore the early signals, and then act surprised when the outcome becomes unavoidable. The shock is not that disaster arrives, but that we convinced ourselves it wouldn’t.

Everything we create is experimental: technologies, institutions, markets, cultures — all provisional. Some experiments stabilise, others fail, and most carry risks we prefer not to examine too closely. When those risks surface, we tell ourselves it was unforeseeable. It rarely is. History shows this.

This is negligence. The tendency to treat serious threats as abstract, temporary, or exaggerated until they are no longer manageable. We downplay what requires attention. We mistake hope for safety. And when the cost arrives, we call it tragedy instead of consequence.

• I increasingly think we are not building for the future so much as exploiting the present, and that feels historically dangerous. It reminded me of the long-term thinking in Are We Being Good Ancestors? and I’m not convinced we are.
• When I look at the last few years alone of market crashes, pandemics, war, and economic instability. I don't see randomness, but delayed consequences of neglected risks and short-term motivations.
• What troubles me most is how easily both producers and consumers escape responsibility: the creators chase growth, the public chases comfort, and the consequences are inherited by people who had no say in the system that produced them.
• We have adapted so fully to this mode of living that we rarely question it. Comfort has replaced responsibility, and consumption has replaced foresight.