The ghosts of future disasters hide in near-misses. “Near-misses are not lucky breaks — they’re unlucky warnings we’re trained to ignore.”

Repeated near-misses don't mean you're getting better at avoiding disaster. They mean you're getting closer to experiencing one. The pieces here — published over more than fifteen years and spanning natural disasters, financial crises, global pandemics, aviation failures, and mass shootings — make the same case in different contexts: warning signals are routinely misread as evidence of safety, and that misreading is predictable, systematic, and preventable.