There’s a peculiar pattern to how misfortune unfolds in our lives. It rarely announces itself during our moments of careful vigilance or cautious preparation. Instead, danger has a way of materializing precisely when we’ve grown most confident, most comfortable, most convinced of our own mastery over circumstance.
This isn’t mysticism or cosmic irony at work. It’s the predictable consequence of how confidence reshapes our behavior in ways we rarely notice until it’s too late.
Consider the experienced driver who’s navigated the same mountain road for twenty years without incident. Every successful trip reinforces a sense of expertise, of terrain mastered. The curves become familiar friends rather than potential threats. And then one evening, perhaps while mentally rehearsing tomorrow’s meeting or singing along to a favorite song, their vehicle finds the one patch of unexpected ice that’s been waiting all these years for that moment of distraction. The danger was always there. What changed was the attention paid to it.
The same dynamic plays out in countless contexts. The seasoned rock climber who’s conquered dozens of peaks begins to internalize their safety protocols to the point of automaticity. Where a beginner triple-checks every carabiner with sweating palms, the expert’s hands move with fluid confidence. This efficiency is valuable, even necessary for progression in the sport. But it also creates a vulnerability. The mental space once occupied by active fear gets filled with thoughts about dinner plans or work deadlines. And in that moment of divided attention, a clip goes unchecked, a foothold goes untested.
Financial markets offer particularly stark examples of this phenomenon. Bull markets don’t just generate profits; they generate conviction. Each successful quarter of returns makes the strategy seem not just effective but inevitable. Investors who entered positions with appropriate hedges and stop-losses gradually shed these precautions as unnecessary friction. Risk management feels like paranoia when everything keeps working. The portfolio that seemed appropriately sized at the beginning balloons through leverage because why wouldn’t you maximize exposure to such a reliable winning formula? Then the market turns, as markets always eventually do, and discovers all these overleveraged positions at precisely the moment their owners have stopped imagining they could fail.
The underlying mechanism is simple but powerful. Repeated success doesn’t just build skill; it builds assumptions. We begin to model the world based on our recent experiences, and those models increasingly omit the low-probability disasters we haven’t encountered. A construction worker who’s balanced on high beams for fifteen years without a fall has internalized the physics of their work so thoroughly that the height stops feeling dangerous. Their body knows how to compensate for wind, how to distribute weight, how to move efficiently in space. This expertise is real and valuable. But it also means they might reach for a tool without first securing their footing, something their younger self would never have done. The danger of the fall hasn’t diminished. Only the perceived danger has.
There’s also a social dimension to invincibility. Success tends to insulate us from criticism and correction. The friend who might have warned you about overconfidence hesitates because you’ve been right so often lately. The colleague who notices a shortcut in your process assumes you know what you’re doing. Organizations promote their most successful members into positions of increasing authority, which means the person least likely to be questioned is often the one most overdue for questioning. We construct bubbles of validation around those who seem invincible, and those bubbles prevent the critical feedback that might puncture dangerous illusions before they become disasters.
The Greek tragedians understood this pattern millennia ago and gave it a name: hubris. Their plays repeatedly showed heroes brought low not by superior enemies but by the blindness that came with their own success. Modern readers sometimes mistake these stories for morality tales about pride deserving punishment. But the Greeks were documenting something more pragmatic, a observable pattern in human psychology and behavior. Hubris wasn’t a sin; it was a predictable failure mode, the shadow cast by achievement.
What makes this pattern particularly insidious is that the feeling of invincibility isn’t entirely wrong. The experienced driver really does possess superior skills. The expert climber genuinely has capabilities the novice lacks. The successful investor may well have legitimate insights into market dynamics. The confidence isn’t baseless; it’s earned through genuine competence. That’s precisely what makes it dangerous. False confidence built on nothing is easily shattered by the first encounter with reality. But confidence built on a foundation of real achievement is resilient enough to persist even as circumstances shift in ways that should undermine it.
The solution isn’t to reject confidence or expertise. Attempting to maintain beginner-level anxiety in the face of accumulated skill is neither possible nor desirable. The paralysis of constant fear prevents the very mastery we’re trying to protect. Instead, the answer lies in building systems that don’t depend on emotional vigilance. The experienced pilot runs through preflight checklists with the same methodical attention as a rookie, not because they feel the danger with equal intensity, but because the checklist exists outside their emotional state. The surgeon counts instruments before closing not because they feel anxious about leaving one inside a patient, but because protocols aren’t optional based on confidence levels.In our personal lives, this means recognizing that the moments when everything seems to be working are precisely the moments that demand renewed attention to fundamentals. When your relationship feels effortlessly strong, that’s when small acts of thoughtfulness matter most, not because they’re needed to solve problems but because they maintain the practices that prevent problems from emerging. When your health seems robust, that’s when routine checkups become most valuable, because they catch the silent warnings your body hasn’t yet forced you to notice.
The feeling of invincibility serves a purpose. It allows us to act decisively, to take necessary risks, to function without the paralysis of constant second-guessing. We need it to move through the world effectively. But we also need to understand it as a feeling rather than an assessment, a psychological state that may or may not correspond to actual safety. The danger doesn’t wait for us to feel vulnerable. It simply waits, patient and indifferent, for the moment when our guard drops and our attention wanders. And we are most likely to drop our guard and wander in our attention precisely when recent experience has taught us that dropping our guard is safe.
The question isn’t whether to feel invincible. At some level, we have to in order to function. The question is whether we can maintain the humility to know that invincibility is always an illusion, even when we’re at our strongest, even when we’re at our best, even when everything is going according to plan. Especially then.
