Why Our Brains Ignore Life's Greatest Uncertainties

The power cut out at 12:33 in the afternoon. What followed in Portugal and Spain on April 28, 2025, was a cascade of failures so perfectly improbable that it reads almost like a thought experiment: a sequence of unlikely events collapsed the electrical grid across both countries, leaving them in complete darkness for five hours, with another eighteen hours needed before full restoration. Generators kicked in, of course, but when those generators needed more fuel, there was no way to deliver it. The trucks that carry diesel require electricity to pump it into their tanks. Two modern European nations, like nearly everywhere else on the planet, had never seriously imagined this particular way of breaking.

A smaller version of the same blindness happened to me this week. I'm in Praia, Cape Verde—a Portuguese colleague, my husband, and I—attending a postgraduate leveling course organized by the Gulbenkian Institute for young scholars from Portuguese-speaking countries. We're staying in a modest ten-suite building within the Portuguese Embassy, simpler than I'd pictured but perfectly adequate. Then Tuesday came, and the water stopped flowing.

We could have prepared. Buckets and jugs would have solved it. But we arrived carrying the certainties of Europe and America, the unexamined assumption that water flows from pipes and taps as a basic fact of existence. The reality of this island, off the coast of Senegal, is dryness. We learned it the hard way.

Here's what troubles me: we like small uncertainties. They keep us sharp, engaged, present. But the large ones—the possibility that electricity vanishes, that water runs dry, that our lives end on a date we don't know—these are so anguishing that the brain simply refuses to hold them. In a way, this is merciful. How many of us would leave the house each morning if we genuinely carried the constant awareness that we will die, sooner or later, and that the infrastructure we depend on is not actually guaranteed?

The human brain, loaded with more prefrontal neurons than any other animal, has the full capacity to imagine the future and act accordingly. Yet almost all of us, almost all the time, live in what I'd call the comfort of not knowing. When confronted with these vast uncertainties, the brain enters such a state of tension and paralysis that we simply shake our heads, push the dark thoughts away, and return to the small uncertainties of the present moment—the ones that keep us functional.

Functional, but not intelligent. Intelligence, as I see it, is flexibility—the ability to adapt. When others lose power or water or life, these should be moments of reckoning, opportunities to recognize that we need contingencies in place for the things that matter most. Instead, we survive this time, and almost immediately we forget. We slip back into the comfort of not knowing.

This is why governments need people whose job is to worry on behalf of everyone else, people whose function is to prevent us from playing Russian roulette with catastrophic consequences—nuclear plants, for instance. Those plants, incidentally, shut down on April 28 as well. Their safety protocols require external power to operate. The irony is almost too neat.

When the odds of failure seem small, the brain locks onto immediate gains and assumes that any problems will happen to someone else. But we have a choice. We can choose to remember what happens when things do go wrong—when they go very wrong, all at once.