I’m by nature an optimist. This might surprise some people when they hear me talk about the seemingly bottomless well of depression and pessimism some people have felt over the past few years. A friend and I were texting this morning and she was more pessimistic than me about the events of the next few weeks. I’m so goddamn optimistic, according to her, you’d think I was delusional. (She didn’t say that, but I’m taking all this to its local extreme.)

The balance of optimistic and pessimistic was already on my mind this morning and I posted on Bluesky that if people could stand the emotional stress they should do an online search for “Black Swan event” and then I asked, “How long is it until the election?”

My friend and I were gaming out what might happen between now and the midterm election in November and I was, admittedly, more optimistic than her. And I cited the reasons I was. And she cited the reasons she wasn’t feeling optimistic.

And the whole thing got me to thinking about research I did in 2025 about a Black Swan event.

I hadn’t heard of a Black Swan event until a few years ago, so I did some research into what exactly it is. I found “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable.,” a 2007 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

What Taleb wrote is that Black Swan events can have either overall positive or negative outcomes but in my mind, a Black Swan event is a negative event.

Over the past 100–plus years, Black Swan events are generally marked by some big, world-changing happenings:

The events leading to and including the outbreak of World War I.

The rise of Adolf Hitler.

The rise of the Soviet Union and the threat of the Cold War.

The September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

Covid-19.

Some people would add other developments to that list, but the key to Black Swan events is understanding, as Taleb wrote:

What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes.

First, it is an outlier, as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility. Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

Some people consider Covid at worst a Grey Swan event and argue the onset of a global pandemic was not at all impossible or unpredictable. It had happened in history, more than once, and countries led by leaders who can reason and think prepared for it.

And Taleb notes:

A small number of Black Swans explain almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives. Ever since we left the Pleistocene, some ten millennia ago, the effect of these Black Swans has been increasing. It started accelerating during the industrial revolution, as the world started getting more complicated, while ordinary events, the ones we study and discuss and try to predict from reading the newspapers, have become increasingly inconsequential.

I was so fascinated by the topic of Black Swan events – and remain so, obviously – that in 2025 I began outlining and writing a book that includes, as a (hopefully) unexpected plan to precipitate a Black Swan. Even though I shelved the book – it’s not one of the several novels I’m working on now – I still think about it. (I shelved it because I chose an unwieldy format in which to write the book that I couldn’t pull off – but I might be able to pick it back up someday and finish it.)

While a Black Swan event might sound science-fictional to people – and there are classic works of science fiction that fit the Black Swan mold, including the arrival of aliens (the topic of many, many SF tales, books and movies, but one that has stuck with me in the decades since I read it, Arthur C. Clarke’s “Childhood’s End,” a 1953 novel about the impact of the sudden arrival of extraterrestrial beings. – we can see from the examples above that sometimes a Black Swan event can be engineered by a small group of people.

Which brings me back to my conversation with my friend this morning. Because whether any possible Black Swan event is planned by a small group of people – a “false flag” operation can lead to or be part of a Black Swan event – or it’s the sudden arrival of beings from another planet, we can all prepare for the shock of a Black Swan event to greater or lesser degrees. Some people might prepare by laying in a supply of water or non-perishable food. Some want to secure their finances. Others will undoubtedly take other steps.

But knowing that Black Swan events can exist – even if another never comes – is a useful thing.