Cross posted from my blog.

What do we do when cataclysmic change looms on the horizon?

The year is 79 and Vesuvius is trembling.

The year is 2020 and a novel virus is discovered in Wuhan, China.

The year is 2025 and a tsunami rises up over the distant horizon, shuttering the rising sun.

It is a 2000ft wave, more gargantuan than all others in recorded history. It is an agent of transformation.

At this distance it still looks small, but you have less than 15 minutes before it crashes down on the coast. You check around - nobody else is running for the hills... You don’t want to look like a crazed alarmist - Chicken Little, yelling that the sky is falling. You sit back down.

Will We See It Coming?

You might recognize these distant tsunamis by the ridiculously large shadows they cast over society. Your feed is abuzz with jokes about it, your friends discuss it frivolously, your parents call and ask you about it, and at work, the air quietly grows apprehensive.

Grappling with such exigent threats is a strange trip. Many of us fail to even try, preferring ignorance as the path of least resistance. When these possibilities crash against our walls of skepticism, we react instinctually such as to deny or modify their gravity. Ultimately, we are grasping desperately for a feeling of control.

In part, this is rooted in our biology—human cognition evolved to process linear changes over manageable timeframes, not the rapid, exponential growth that defines paradigm shifts today. We fall behind when we make incremental adjustments to our existing frameworks and worldview trying to fit exponential change into linear systems.

Why Do We Wait?

Mentally, we build bridges towards control by whatever means possible - rationality, reduction, substitution, avoidance etc. Often, these are really straw-man mechanisms - we’re constructing lesser models of the real thing so that we can characterize it, to know it and to be able to react to it, even if in ignorance.

We avert our eyes, because the thought of such overwhelming change is too terrifying. “These things always look worse than they are. Someone would have sounded the alarm by now if it were serious.” Sometimes, this works just fine; the tsunami turns out smaller than projected and washes harmlessly off the city bulwark. Other times, we drown.

We hunker down. We retreat into bunkers—intellectual, emotional, even physical—believing that, like...

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