“Apocalyptic” turning into apocrypha?

First itemize a few of apocalyptic predictions that have failed to materialize over the past five decades: global nuclear war, communist world hegemony, global starvation, oil depletion, nuclear winter, a prolonged night/new ice age, and the international meltdown because of the millennium computer bug.

Now itemize—again an arbitrary few—crises we have actually lived through in the last three decades or so: the banking crisis of the early 1990s, the Mexican near-default in early 1996, the Asian financial crisis in 1997, Long Term Capital Management collapse in 1998; the bursting of the dot.com/stock market bubble in 2000, the terrorist attacks of September 11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the breakdown in the Doha round of multilateral trade talks, the 2008 financial crisis and Great Recession, the default of Greece, the resurgence in Western populism and nativism. . .(and don’t forgot the Argentine default of 2001 and the world fisheries collapse and. . .)

And yet, the habitual response: “But, but. . .it still could get worse!” Well, yes, it could. What, though, are we getting from this psychological habituation to it-always-could-get-much-worse? One answer: Doing so saves us all the trouble and worry of having to figure out the details.