Debriefing Encounters with the Unthinkable

"Every one of us is a survivor of multiple encounters with the Unthinkable"

Why does that read fresh and surprising? Why does it jolt us into shifting perspective (aka reframing)?

Because we don't normally consider it. We're blind, subconscious, essentially asleep to this. Per dream logic, we perpetually find ourselves caught, Groundhog Day-style, in a fraught game where we MUST NOT TOUCH THE WALL, because it's REALLY REALLY HORRIBLE IF YOU TOUCH THE WALL, yet we touch the wall every single time (only scoring points by delaying the inevitable). We then hit "replay" so compulsively that we never hover thoughtfully above for a broader view. We're too busy stoking our petrification about the dreaded wall.

Let's consider two especially horrific and extreme examples of apocalyptic events that would have made any sane person pull the world's emergency brake:

When Russian invaded Ukraine and began perpetrating all those bombings and barbarities, it was expected that Ukraine would soon be essentially ruined, even if they managed to fight on bravely. Four years later, there's still a Ukraine, not a demolished killing field. Not that there hasn't been massive loss of all sorts (I'm certainly not making light!), but the people there are not post-apocalyptic wretches resorting to cannibalism. After four years of pummeling and atrocities and civilian targeting, the country is not ruined. Even leaving aside its remarkable military turnaround, it's somehow still Ukraine.

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A great many people stopped working during Covid lockdown and survived with nary a yelp. A relatively small number went through foreclosure, but there were not vast mobs caught between grind stones of Dickensian poverty. No starving to death. No hordes of impoverished wretches living in Hoovervilles. Before covid, it would have been unimaginable to survive any such thing. And while it sure wasn't fun, here we all are. Still us.

An injustice or a cruel word can grate for decades. But survival and continuity are scarcely noticed. We just draw a new hard red line of unthinkability.


It's particularly hard to parse the daylight between doomed expectation and mildly suboptimal outcome. If I’m terrified there's a burglar in the house, and discover it's just a window swinging in the wind but stub my toe on my way back to bed, some deep visceral sense pipes up to holler “I KNEW IT!”