Why We Miss the Risks That Actually Reach Us

The mind stores danger as single events. Real harm travels as a chain.

Posted June 1, 2026 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

In September 2023, a cluster of rainstorms settled over the Libyan desert—inches of rain where inches of rain are no one’s idea of normal. The storms gathered into Storm Daniel, a Mediterranean cyclone that reached eastern Libya on the 10th. Over the next 24 hours, parts of the region took five to nine inches. The water funneled into the dry valley running through Derna, a place little troubled by rain. One resident later said the valley was completely dry at sunset. By 2 a.m., the water had topped the Abu Mansour Dam, working at its clay and rock until it gave. When it collapsed, and then a second dam behind it, the valley filled. Thousands were killed or swept away.

You can tell the Derna story as a single thing—a flood. But it was never one thing. The rainfall was extreme, and climate scientists have since judged it intensified by a warming Mediterranean; under ordinary weather, the dams would have held. The dams themselves were failing—built in the 1970s, cracked for years, flagged repeatedly—but without the loaded storm, the cracks would have stayed cracks. And the deferred maintenance traced back further still: a divided country struggled to sustain the boring work of inspection and repair. Climate-intensified rainfall, deferred maintenance, collapsed state capacity—no single one would have drowned a city. The disaster required all of them, in combination .

This is the part our minds resist. We reason in straight lines: A causes B, so we look for A. Psychologists who study how people choose between explanations have found we reliably prefer the simpler story, the one with fewer causes , and judge it not only better but more likely to be true. Call it one-cause thinking. It served our ancestors well; the rustle in the grass had one cause worth attending to, fast. It serves us badly when harm travels—when a maintenance gap becomes a structural failure becomes a death no one files under “governance.” We anchor on the trigger and stop tracing. We discount whatever is distant in time or domain from the cause: the not my department of the mind.

Scale this up, and the worry changes. An event is frightening but bounded. A cascade is frightening because it is open—the harm keeps finding new domains to enter. It resists the usual comforts. You cannot tell yourself someone is responsible because responsibility is spread across the chain. You cannot point to the one reliable safeguard, because whether a given buffer absorbs the danger or amplifies it depends on where in the chain it sits. The same reserve can be the brake in one cascade and the accelerant in the next. No single rescuer arrives every time.

Researchers who model coupled systems have shown why: in interdependent networks , failure in one network changes the conditions in another, so collapse can arrive abruptly rather than gradually—a small fraction of failures in one place fragmenting the whole. The retrospective on almost every cascade contains a version of the same sentence: the off-ramp existed, and it was upstream, in a domain that did not think the problem was theirs. The places where these things can be stopped are rarely the dramatic front line. They are mundane: a maintenance budget, a monitoring threshold, a moment of coordination between people who do not believe they share a problem.

So the question to ask of any worry is not “What is the cause?” but “Where does this go next—one honest step downstream, into the domain I would normally call someone else’s?”

Living in cascade-shaped worry is its own trap; catastrophizing is not understanding.

These four habits can help us anticipate risk

Extend the chain by one link. For any risk, don’t stop at the trigger. Ask where it goes next—not to the apocalypse, just one step downstream, into the domain you’d normally consider someone else’s. That single step is where most missed off-ramps live.
Distrust the closed story. When a crisis resolves and the narrative snaps shut with a tidy lesson, notice that the snap is part relief, part avoidance. The useful question is rarely “What was the cause?” but “What was the crossing, the moment this stopped being one kind of problem and became another?”
Hold your role loosely. In a cascade, almost no one is purely a victim, a bystander, or a rescuer. Most of us amplify and absorb by turns, depending on where we stand. That is uncomfortable, and it is also where the leverage is—usually upstream, usually boring.
Pick one current worry. Trace it one domain downstream. Name the upstream off-ramp no one owns. That is the work. The off-ramp is always upstream. The only question is whether anyone is standing there.

Britannica. (2025, September 2). Libya flooding of 2023 . Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/event/Libya-flooding-of-2023

Buldyrev, S. V., Parshani, R., Paul, G., Stanley, H. E., & Havlin, S. (2010). Catastrophic cascade of failures in interdependent networks . Nature, 464 , 1025–1028.

Lombrozo, T. (2007). Simplicity and probability in causal explanation . Cognitive Psychology, 55 (3), 232–257

Undheim, T. A. (2026). CREF Atlas v3.11.29 — Case: Libya Derna Flood Compound Cascade 2023 . CEB v8.5.37. https://cref-atlas.com/

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Trond Arne Undheim, Ph.D., is a former Stanford and MIT researcher in systemic risk and policy, host of the Futurized podcast, and author of The Platinum Workforce .

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This article is part of the Bringwise Psychology Journal — daily insights on human behavior, mental health, and personal growth.