A closer look
When facing a completely unprecedented disaster like a hurricane or a pandemic, the human brain will simply pretend everything is fine and refuse to evacuate. Normalcy bias shuts down your threat response by aggressively insisting that the future will look exactly like the past, causing people to casually finish their drinks while the restaurant is actively catching fire. Because you have never personally burned to death before, your brain literally cannot process the incoming data that you might burn to death today, resulting in fatal inaction. It perfectly explains why civilization acts incredibly sluggishly to massive existential threats, as our primitive hardware would rather comfortably burn to a crisp than undergo the terrifying stress of completely upending our daily routine
