The Comfort of Not Admitting

Most people who get disrupted by change are not surprised by it. They saw it coming. They read the same articles, heard the same predictions, watched the same case studies get dissected in conference rooms and group chats. What they did not do was act on any of it. And the reason is not that they failed to understand what they were reading. The reason is that understanding something and admitting it are two entirely different things.

Admission is the more dangerous act. Understanding lets you keep your distance. You can observe, analyse, and form an opinion without any of it touching you. Admission collapses that distance. It makes the thing personal, and once it is personal, it demands a response. So people stop just short of admitting it. They understand it intellectually and leave it there, safe, removed from anything that would require them to change.

This is not stupidity. The men doing this are often among the sharpest in their fields. They can identify twenty nuances in any argument. What they cannot bring themselves to do is apply that intelligence to a conclusion that would unsettle the life they have built around their current capabilities. And so they don't. They dress the avoidance up in scepticism, in nuance, in the entirely reasonable observation that predictions of disruption often disappoint. And they wait.