The Normalcy Bias or "It can't happen to me"

I survived a catastrophic hard drive failure of my computer.  It went to the point where I had to replace the hard drive and start over.  Even though I backed up my data, it had been a while since I had, so I lost some of my data.

As I looked back at it, I had developed a normalcy bias.  This is a fancy term for the wrong-minded thinking that because something has never happened, it will never happen, or to put it more succinctly, "it can't happen to me!"

Now the data that I lost is easy to replace; I had some ballistic charts that I had found and copied from the internet.  I had some downloaded PDF manuals and books etc.  But in the grand scheme of things, I didn't suffer any long term loss.

However, I think that it was more beneficial than harmful because it really caused me to step back and look at the way that I had been thinking and frankly, it startled and scared me a bit.  If it was so easy for me to ignore this simple thing, what else might I be overlooking?

My favorite time of the year is here!

I am not talking about Spring (which is amazing and makes me feel like a kid again every time it rolls around).  I am referring to my local gun show.  It is here this coming weekend and I love it.

My friends and I have a tradition where we meet at Bob Evans for breakfast, hang out and shoot the breeze.  Then we go to the gun show and hang out with all the other freedom loving Americans.  I usually don't buy much, sometimes a scope or a grip or something, but mainly I just like being there.