Why do capable people take actions that cause obvious damage—and genuinely not see the connection? The manager who berates his team and wonders why morale tanks. The person who never maintains relationships and can’t understand why they’re alone. These aren’t complex butterfly effects. They’re straightforward cause and effect. So why can’t people see it?
In this episode, I dig into the cognitive mechanisms that create consequence-blindness. We explore how people don’t observe their own behavior—they narrate it. How identity protection makes us incapable of seeing our actions accurately. And why society-centric education might be making the problem worse by teaching us to diffuse responsibility into “we” instead of owning “I did this.”
I also confront the Cassandra problem: what do you do when you can see the disaster coming, you warn people you care about, and they ignore you? There’s no clean answer. But there might be an honest one.
This isn’t about morality or karma. It’s about understanding why humans are systematically bad at connecting actions to outcomes—and what that means for anyone trying to prevent avoidable damage.
No easy solutions. Just uncomfortable clarity.
