If the prospect of a bad result gets the heart racing - a plane crash, a terrible disease, a loss of 30 percent of your portfolio - most people will take strong steps to avoid it. They will pay too little attention to a comforting thought, which is that worst-case scenarios usually don't come to fruition.
I'm actually quite pro-technology, but I'm a worrier, so I like to envision worst-case scenarios.
so long as it promises to exclude some greater possible evils.
Legislation that harms some individuals is proper
When raising money, you want to look through the lens of 'What happens when things go wrong?'
Hurricane Irene's advance coverage was heavy on worst-case scenarios. Thank goodness they didn't pan out.
I think, of the kind of erratic behavior that many of us feared once Trump came into office. And I think you're seeing evidence of that, even though, you know, some of the worst-case scenarios that we imagined have not yet, mercifully, come to pass. I mean, for example, he has not destroyed NATO. He has not launched a trade war with China. He has not lifted sanctions on Russia. In all those cases, in part, because his hands had been tied. And of course, it's only a year in, so he's still got time to go.
A couple days before the stunts, if I'm doing something particularly dangerous, I will go over every worst-case scenario in my head, like this could happen, this could happen, this could happen, this could happen. I try to think about that to where it's ingrained in me.
It's a barrel of laughs, isn't it? It makes The Day After look like friggin'...insert name of cheerful thing here. It was one of the things that made me really worry about worst-case scenarios. There's something impish and probably somewhat therapeutic about thinking about those things.
I'm a paranoid person. And I think - I'm the kind of person that can come up with lots of negative scenarios. But I remembered thinking that seemed like - that was a stretch even for me.
Contract law is essentially a defensive scorched-earth battleground where the constant question is, "if my business partner was possessed by a brain-eating monster from beyond spacetime tomorrow, what is the worst thing they could do to me?"
I've always thought of fantasy as a genre of best-case scenarios, and horror as a genre of worst-case scenarios.
Fear is the workout we give ourselves imagining what will happen if things don't work out. . . . Worry is our effort to imagine every possible way to avoid the outcome that is causing us fear, and failing that, to survive the thing that we fear if it comes to fruition.
The taste for worst-case scenarios reflects the need to master fear of what is felt to be uncontrollable. It also expresses an imaginative complicity with disaster.
I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint. ... When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he 'hopes' to win tomorrow's battle or that he's 'visualizing victory'.
I think a lot of time, I'm just writing my worst fears.
it is the possibilities which are the most terrible things in life.