Nobody reads the disclosures that roll down your computer screen. You click 'I agree' but you don't know what you're agreeing to.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
People have the problem of denial. This is one of the things I learned in Lebanon. Everybody who left Beirut when the war started, including my parents, said, 'Oh, its temporary.' It lasted 17 years! People tend to underestimate the gravity of these situations. That's how they work.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Denial can lead people to misjudge the severity of situations, often underestimating their duration and impact.
In this quote, Nassim Nicholas Taleb reflects on the human tendency to deny harsh realities, drawing from his observations in Lebanon during the prolonged civil war. He highlights that people often see challenging situations as short-lived, which can lead to significant underestimations of their seriousness and duration, ultimately resulting in a disconnect from the realities they face.
Themes
DenialRealityUnderestimationWarLebanon
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in a discussion about coping mechanisms in difficult situations.
More from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
All quotes βFragility is the quality of things that are vulnerable to volatility.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Those who were unlucky in life in spite of their skills would eventually rise. The lucky fool might have benefited from some luck in life; over the longer run he would slowly converge to the state of a less-lucky idiot. Each one would revert to his long-term properties.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Individuals should think about the worst-case scenarios and plan for them. The world will be crazier than you think it will be. Put money away, and then you can live with much more freedom.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A good maxim allows you to have the last word without even starting a conversation.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
A Stoic is someone who transforms fear into prudence, pain into transformation, mistakes into initiation, and desire into undertaking.
Nassim Nicholas TalebRead
Similar quotes
From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year...death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again forever.
Graham GreeneRead
There is nothing more foolish, nothing more given to outrage than a useless mob.
HerodotusRead
For every bourgeois, in the heat of youth, if only for a day, for a minute, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of heroic enterprises. The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of oriental princesses; every rotary carries about inside him the debris of a poet.
Gustave FlaubertRead
As a nuclear power - as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon - the United States has a moral responsibility to act.
Barack ObamaRead
A gastronomer who is not an environmentalis t is just stupid. Whereas an environmentalis t who is not a gastronomer is sad. It's possible to change the world even while preserving the concept of the right of pleasure.
Carlo PetriniRead
One's true worth as a human being is not a matter of outward appearance or title, but derives rather from the breadth of one's spirit. Everything comes down to faith and conviction. It is what is in one's heart, and the substance of one's actions that count.
Daisaku IkedaRead