You are driving. Traffic is what it is; sometimes flowing, sometimes times crawling, and at times stalling. You do what you have to do. Go with the flow.

And then it starts raining. Funny enough, everyone speeds up. You can watch it happen. The first proper drops land and the whole road accelerates, motorbikes and scooters especially, heads down, throttle open, as though there were somewhere on the far end of the road that they need to get to, where it isn't raining.

There isn't. That's the thing. The rain is falling on all of it. Unless you're fifty metres from your gate, you are going to arrive wet, and the only variable you've actually changed is how fast you were going on a road that just became slippery, with reduced visibility, in traffic full of other people who also just decided to go faster.

So what you get is no meaningful benefit for substantially more risk; taken at the exact moment conditions got worse. Every part of that is knowable in advance. None of it requires expertise.

Ask anyone, calmly, on a dry afternoon, whether you should ride faster in the rain, and they'll tell you no. The knowledge is there. It just doesn't get consulted, because by the time the rain starts, you're not really making a decision. Something else is driving, not your thinking self.

What I think is actually happening is that discomfort demands action, and speed is the only action available. You can't stop the rain, you can't stay dry, you can't do anything about the situation at all. But you can go faster, so that’s what you do. It feels like a response. It isn't one. It's just the nearest lever.

The same thing shows up everywhere something goes wrong. The project slips, so people work later and sleep less and make worse decisions faster. Money gets tight, so the decisions get quicker and less examined. You spend on things indiscriminately in the hope that they will turn fortunes around. Something breaks, and everyone starts moving urgently in the direction they were already moving. It’s like closing your eyes and running when a fire starts, hoping that if you don’t see the fire, it won’t burn you.

In almost all of these, the correct move is to slow down — the situation got harder, so your margin for error got thinner, so you need more care, not less. But slowing down feels like doing nothing, and doing nothing feels unbearable when something is wrong.

Then when it goes badly, the rain gets the blame. The road was slippery. The client was unreasonable. The investment didn’t pay. The timing was terrible. All true, and all beside the point, because the rain wasn't the decision. The throttle was. I ride slower when it rains. Not out of virtue, but because it just seems like the obvious reading of the situation.

Conditions got worse, so I take fewer chances. I keep expecting to look around and find everyone else doing the same thing. But I don’t. What I find is quite the opposite. The more grave the situation, the more intense the response.

I don't get it.