I’ve had a few near-miss normal accidents this year that’s put the fear of entangled complexity into me. Came within a hair of extreme clusterfuck. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_Accidents …
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The potent risk/fragility is a combination of a) crisis or stress situation where you’re sloppy b) legit need to temporarily secure assets in centralized ways (transport etc) c) confounding circumstances (medical emergencies etc) Perfect storm for errors piling on errors
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I have other smaller examples. Once a friend was in an accident and I had to drive him to hospital. Under the emergency stress, hey, I hit another car in my hurry to back my own car out. Minor bump/scratch, but still.
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In general, moral of the story, things are more likely to go very wrong when they are already going slightly wrong. The more complex the system/environment, the more crises will cause such 2nd order failure interactions.
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I have no problem admitting I’m not exactly the best person in an emergency/crisis. I’m not awful, but I’m not a good first pick, shall we say. I’m best in slower, less urgent situations where there’s time to think.
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I’m sort of C- okay in physical crises (acting fast, locally) but I’m at my worst dealing with crises involving bureaucracy/paperwork. I get flustered and thrash and there’s a good chance I’ll make things worse if I don’t slow down, breathe and consciously switch gears.
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In general, it really sucks that cost of technological modernity is having to take care of a bunch of insecure physical artifacts (keys, cards, numbers, original docs) that control access to everything — spaces, money, healthcare. The 2FA phone is an especially horrible one.
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Every crisis now is more than the basic crisis (health, injury, loss, damage). It’s also a “stack crisis” where you have to reprogram your connection to the information infrastructure API on the fly.
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I’m sorry you’re having to deal with both of these big stressful things at the same time. Sounds really hard. If there’s anything I can do here in LA to help don’t hesitate to reach out.
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Thanks. On top of things for now

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Situations are a huge challenge to mindfulness. We try to fit a new, hard situation into our existing life at the speed of ordinary surprise. Shut down the existing life as quickly as possible to focus on the new.
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