In an opinion piece in Knack, Annelies Van Erp cites Matt K. Lewis from The Week when he compares the disappeared Boeing 777 with the murder of J.F.Kennedy. As Lewis writes in his original piece, “(b)oth undermined our naive faith in modernity.” Whereas Lewis says we expect some technician to follow and control every movement of a plane, Van Erp also refers to The Guardian who point out that we think we have full control of the surface of our planet. This is similar to what Arjen van Veelen writes in De Standaard: it’s disconcerting to find that we can’t just CTRL-F the plane.

In my opinion, it’s an overarching trust in systems. We are insured, we have a long-term employment contract, with a company car, we have a predictable mortgage to pay and our kids go to school and grow up. We know the system perfectly well, so we assume everything is covered. Until a black swan comes up, or a gadfly, or a jester. A Ronald Janssen. A Breivik. A Fukushima. A 9-11. An MH370.

No insurance in the world, no enterprise architecture, no social security and no government can keep the world out. There is only one solution: be open to what happens. Then we can face the unknown and try to accept it. Even when it is an extremely unhappy event, we eventually are faced with only one choice: acceptance. It is, unfortunately, what it is. We told ourselves that staying inside would be possible, but now more than ever before, it turns out not to be possible at all.