Knock, knock. Who’s there?
I’m asleep when I suddenly hear my intercom ring.
Since I have kids, every suspicious sound wakes me up immediately.
I look at my watch. It’s almost midnight.
I quickly assess that it’s probably a prank.
I value my sleep, so I decide to ignore it.
Five minutes later, I hear noise on the staircase.
Shit. This might be something more than a prank.
I get up, go to the front door, and look through the peephole.
My neighbour is talking to a police officer.
That’s interesting.
Thirty seconds later, a police officer knocks at my door.
I open the door, and the light from the hallway blinds me.
I ask what it’s all about.
The police speak in German. I’m not a native speaker, and in my half-asleep state, I struggle to understand what they’re saying.
Then they say something I immediately understand.
“There is a bomb. We are evacuating the neighbourhood.”
“There is what?!” I say.
“There is an old bomb a block away from here. I need to know if you want to evacuate or stay.”
Wow. At least I have some options.
“Can I think about it for five minutes?” I ask.
“Sure, but be quick.”
I close the door. My wife has gotten up in the meantime; she already knows what’s happening.
My first thought: we’re probably more likely to survive a bomb than the chaos of waking the kids, getting them out the door, and wandering God knows where for God knows how long.
We receive an emergency message on our phones explaining the situation in more detail.
A Second World War bomb has been found in the river next to us. It’s at least a block away, but technically, we are still within the impact radius. A team of sappers is supposed to come and disarm it, but for security reasons, they are evacuating the neighbourhood.
The bomb has been there for 80 years—can’t it wait until morning?
But back to the evacuation.
How do we decide what to do?
“I have an idea!” I tell my wife.
I open ChatGPT and start typing.
The prompt goes more or less like this: How many people died over the last 20 years in different European countries from unexploded bombs?
GPT gives a nice summary. In short, a handful of people died, and generally those who discovered bombs or technicians trying to disarm them.
I hope GPT is not bullshitting me this time. I check the sources, and as far as I can tell from this quick research, the risk is small.
My brain is shouting, Works for me! I really just want to go back to sleep.
I talk it through with my wife, and we quickly estimate the likelihood of being blown away. It’s orders of magnitude lower than the risk of crossing the street and getting fatally hit.
We were also relatively far from the location of the bomb, and our building stands behind other large buildings that would absorb the blast first (not that I know anything about the impact of an old bomb; this is just my mind trying to make sense of the situation).
We decide to tell the police that we’re staying and then go back to sleep.
We woke up at 7 a.m., and roughly fifteen minutes later we received a message that the bomb had been disarmed.
The situation was serious, yet the next few days brought some funny conversations with our neighbours about the whole event.
It was so abstract and unexpected that we could barely believe it had actually happened. And at least among the few people we spoke to, others had also stayed in their apartments.
When we told this story to our family, however, they weren’t amused.
My mom literally said that I risked the lives of my family and that it was a reckless thing to do. Five minutes later she didn’t look particularly bothered, so maybe she just said what she thought was the right thing to say. In the end, it didn’t feel like a big deal to her either (love you, Mum).
Despite my mom calling it reckless, the true danger was minimal. This is exactly the kind of mismatch between perceived and actual risk we see in many areas of life, reflecting the different psychological shortcuts people subconsciously use.
For example, parents may be afraid of their kids being kidnapped—an event that is extremely unlikely in a country like Germany. Or people may be afraid of flying, despite it being one of the safest modes of transport.
I’m a fan of developing and using intuition, but there are cases where it leads us astray and makes us act when action isn’t needed.
Our decisions don’t exist in a vacuum. Investing time and energy to reduce one risk automatically comes at the expense of addressing others—risks that may be just as large, or even larger.
Take the chances of having a long-lasting and happy marriage. In the US and the UK, roughly 40–45% of marriages end in divorce. The odds of success aren’t far from a coin toss.
If you live in one of those countries and you are married, it’s worth asking: what do my spouse and I do differently from the average couple to increase our chances of staying married? Are we really that different from the mainstream? Do we actually do things our friends don’t—friends who might already be divorced or struggling?
Every step we commit to requires time and attention, resources we might not have if we’ve already spent them elsewhere.
So, as my wife always says, when our kids challenge us: pick your battles wisely.