Short answer: NO.
It feels like every week we face a new "Black Swan".
A drone attack, an assassination, a war, a financial scare, a pandemic, a political shock. The world seems unstable, unpredictable, and out of control.
But is it... really?
What a Black Swan really is
Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined a Black Swan as an event that is:
- Highly improbable,
- With massive impact,
- And only explained after the fact.
By definition, Black Swans are RARE.
Therefore, if everything becomes a Black Swan, the term loses its meaning.
Most of the crises we face are not "unimaginable". They are foreseeable, even predicted by some, but ignored by most!
They are kinda Grey Swans.
What makes them feel like Black Swans is the way our world works:
- Interdependence means a local crack spreads instantly across the globe (in my Quantum Framework, I use the entanglement principle and the concepts of propagation and recoding to observe impacts).
- Media and algorithms AMPLIFY every shock, making each protest or disruption appear systemic.
- Our own cognitive biases overestimate volatility and underestimate the silent periods of stability... We are wired to remember the emotion that the shock creates... not the absence of crisis because by essence, it's a "neutral" situation.
The perception is one of permanent Black Swans.
The reality is more subtle.
I’ve launched a questionnaire to map how the world sees the future. Hundreds of you have already taken part… but I need more data.
The first results are absolutely fascinating. They revealed blind spots I hadn't considered. I'll publish a full report and analysis in the coming weeks - and plan to repeat the experiment regularly.
I'll share not only the findings, but also the methodology, the biases, and the limits of the exercise.
One clear bias already: most respondents so far belong to elites/higher social classes. Which, in itself, is telling - it offers a rare window into how elites imagine the future.
If you haven't participated yet, please do. If you have, share it widely. The more perspectives we collect, the sharper the picture becomes.
From rare shocks to systemic volatility
The real shift is structural. Our systems have never been built for resilience, but for efficiency. That is extremely different.