Must We Reach a Breaking Point Before We Choose to Change?

There is something happening across Europe these days that deserves more than a quick glance at the headlines. What began in mid-September with high school students in Paris has grown into a nationwide movement in France, joined by parents, teachers and unions, and from there it has travelled across borders. From Belgium to Albania, Greece, Spain and Italy, young people have occupied schools, marched in their thousands and set up protest camps, and in several cities the anger has ended in clashes with the police. In Tirana, a demonstration outside the Ministry of Education turned violent, leaving people injured on both sides, while in Spain and Portugal the same frustration takes the shape of tents in public squares and of rents a young salary can no longer carry.

Different countries, different governments, different circumstances. And yet, when you listen to the people behind the banners, the concerns sound remarkably alike: classrooms that are falling apart, teachers who are missing, education that costs more every year, housing that moves further out of reach, and a generation that quietly wonders whether the future will offer them the opportunities it once offered their parents.

Watching these images, I found myself returning to a question that reaches far beyond this autumn's headlines. How many times has humanity reached a breaking point before finally accepting that something had to change? And what if, while we are watching these tensions unfold, something completely unexpected changes the direction of history altogether?

It has happened before. More often than we might imagine.

We have been here before

The first thing I would like every reader to take from this article is a calm one: what we are seeing is neither unique nor without precedent. Europe has walked this road several times, and each time it eventually found a way through, not always quickly and not always gently, but it found one.

In 1848, the Springtime of the Peoples swept across the continent within a few weeks. Economic hardship, poor harvests, unemployment and a hunger for political representation ignited revolutions from Paris to Vienna, from the German and Italian states to the Romanian lands. In the short term almost all of them were crushed, yet their ideas survived the defeat: serfdom was abolished in the Austrian Empire, the first modern constitutions appeared, and the national movements born in those months went on to redraw the map of Europe in the decades that followed.

In May 1968, France lived through one of the most extraordinary upheavals of its modern history. It began in the universities, with students protesting the conditions in which they studied, a detail worth noticing in October 2026, and grew into a general strike that brought the country to a standstill. The crisis was not settled in the streets but at a negotiating table: the Grenelle agreements of 27 May 1968 raised the minimum wage by 35% and average real wages by 10%. The political system survived, but French society never went back to being quite the same.

After the financial crisis of 2008, austerity, unemployment and uncertainty filled the squares of Greece, Spain and Portugal. In 2011, Spain's Indignados camped for weeks in Madrid's Puerta del Sol, the very square where tents are being raised again today, and helped reshape the country's political landscape. Across southern Europe governments fell, new parties were born, and the steady pressure of the street gradually softened some of the hardest measures.

And in 2018, France's Yellow Vests began as a protest against a planned fuel-tax increase and grew into a much wider cry about living standards and dignity. After weeks of violent Saturdays, the government cancelled the fuel-tax rise, and President Macron announced a €100 monthly increase in the minimum wage, tax-free overtime and the cancellation of a tax rise for low-income pensioners, acknowledging that the anger behind the protests was deep and in many ways legitimate.

Each of these episodes had its own causes and its own price. Yet across almost two centuries the same pattern repeats itself: people express their concerns, institutions struggle to respond, pressure accumulates, and eventually something has to give. What I find most important is what gave in the end. More often than not, it was not the people, but the refusal to listen. Solutions came through negotiation, reform and compromise, sometimes late and sometimes imperfect, but they came.

I see no reason to believe this wave will be different. In France, the Prime Minister has already acknowledged the students' concerns and promised concrete proposals by the end of October. History suggests that this is how such moments usually begin to close.

A breaking point is not a Black Swan

There is, however, an important distinction to make. None of these protest movements was truly unexpected. The warning signs were there long before the streets filled, written in budgets, in rents, in classrooms and in the quiet frustration of people who felt unheard. What was hard to predict was never the tension itself, but the moment it would tip over, and what would follow once it did.

That distinction leads us to a concept which, I believe, can help us see the present more clearly.

For centuries, Europeans were convinced that all swans were white, not because anyone had proved it, but because every swan they had ever seen was white. Then black swans were found in Australia, and a single observation overturned what had seemed an unquestionable truth. The essayist and former options trader Nassim Nicholas Taleb borrowed this image in his 2007 book The Black Swan to describe events that share three characteristics: they lie outside our normal expectations, their impact is extraordinary, and once they have happened we explain them as though they should have been obvious all along.

Before such an event, we struggle to imagine it. Afterwards, we struggle to understand how we failed to see it coming. And history, if we look honestly, is full of them.

The swans that changed history

On 28 June 1914, a few shots fired in Sarajevo killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, and set off a chain of events that led to the outbreak of the First World War by early August. Europe was already full of tension in 1914, with rival alliances, an arms race and rising nationalism, yet almost no one imagined that a single assassination would pull an entire continent into four years of industrial slaughter. Nor did the story end there. The harsh peace that followed bred a resentment that culminated, two decades later, in the Second World War, while the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression created the despair in which extremism found fertile ground.

This is the darkest lesson in this article, and I do not want to soften it. When social tension is left unresolved for too long, the event that finally changes the direction of history can be war.

But even this darkest chapter carries a second lesson. Only five years after the Second World War, in a Europe still in ruins, Robert Schuman proposed pooling French and German coal and steel so that any war between the two historic rivals would become, in his words, "not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible". From the worst rupture humanity has ever known came the beginning of the European project, the very framework within which today's protesters, whatever their anger, can still march, negotiate and be heard.

On 9 November 1989, after months of mounting pressure and peaceful demonstrations, a confused announcement about travel regulations helped open the Berlin Wall. A reality that had seemed permanent for twenty-eight years became temporary in a single evening, and families separated for a generation embraced at the checkpoints. For those of us in Romania, December 1989 belongs to the same story. Two years later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. There had been signs, from economic decline to reforms and nationalist movements, but the speed and scale of the collapse surprised almost everyone. What had looked solid was far more fragile than we assumed.

On 11 September 2001, a single morning transformed air travel, security, foreign policy and the delicate balance between public safety and individual freedom. Taleb himself has called it a genuine Black Swan. In September 2008, the failure of Lehman Brothers turned an already developing crisis into a global collapse of confidence. The rupture was sudden; the vulnerabilities behind it had been accumulating for years.

And then came 2020. Within weeks, borders closed, schools moved online and hundreds of millions of people lived under restrictions that would have seemed unthinkable a few months earlier. And yet Taleb insisted that COVID-19 was not a Black Swan at all, but a "white swan", an event of great impact that was bound to happen sooner or later; his 2007 book had already warned that a more connected world made the spread of such a virus foreseeable. Perhaps that makes its lesson even more important. Sometimes the greatest danger is not what we cannot predict, but what we already know and choose not to prepare for.

What I learned when the world stopped

I lived that spring from the inside. As the QHSE manager of a medical textile manufacturer in Arad, I watched the gates of the factories around us close one after another, while we became almost the only company in our area that kept working non-stop. Not because we were immune to fear, because we were not, but because we refused to treat the crisis as something that had arrived from nowhere. We searched for every element and every lever that could protect people without stopping the work, and above all we searched for balance: between production and protection, between those who were afraid and those who needed to keep going, between the rules on paper and the human beings who had to live them every single day.

What those months taught me has stayed with me ever since. A crisis does not only test your procedures; it tests the trust you built before it arrived. Where people had been listened to, they listened back. Where balance had been cared for, the breaking point never came.

I recognise the same principle in every accident I have ever investigated. A serious accident may look sudden, but when we look closer we almost always find a history of small warning signs, tolerated deviations, unanswered questions and risks that slowly became familiar. The final event draws everyone's attention, while the conditions that made it possible were there long before. A responsible organisation is not the one that believes nothing unexpected will ever happen. It is the one that recognises its vulnerabilities, learns from weak signals and builds the capacity to respond.

I do not believe societies are any different.

Not every Black Swan destroys

When we hear the words Black Swan, we tend to imagine disasters. But history also holds surprises that opened doors. In 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that a mould had stopped bacteria from growing in a culture left in his laboratory, an observation that led, through years of work by many others, to penicillin and to modern medicine as we know it. The internet began in modest research networks and ended up transforming the way humanity communicates, learns and works. Neither fits Taleb's strict definition perfectly, since their effects unfolded over years and many hands, but both remind us that the unexpected does not always arrive to destroy what we have built. Sometimes it opens a door we did not know existed.

What could the next one be?

We live in a world more interconnected, and more dependent on invisible systems, than at any other time in history. So, not as a prediction but as an honest exercise in understanding uncertainty, it is worth asking what kind of unexpected event could change the direction of the crisis we are living through.

It could be biological. A new pathogen could once again empty the streets overnight, as 2020 did. But pandemics are known risks, and only a threat falling well outside our understanding would truly surprise us. In today's climate, I suspect a new attempt to keep people at home might inflame the anger rather than calm it.

It could be technological. Artificial intelligence is not itself a surprise, because its progress is visible to all of us, but its consequences may be: a breakthrough that dramatically accelerates science, or an interaction between autonomous systems that cascades through essential services. The real question is whether human judgment and ethical maturity grow alongside that power.

It could be a digital or infrastructure collapse. Imagine waking up to find banking, communications or electricity unavailable across several countries, not for minutes, but for days. Cyberattacks are a recognised risk; what would surprise us is a chain of consequences that no existing defence had anticipated.

It could be geopolitical, and here I must name the darkest possibility honestly: a wider war. Twice in the last century, unresolved tensions met a single spark and dragged a continent into catastrophe. A war would certainly change direction. It would silence the protests, redirect budgets and rewrite every priority. But it is the Black Swan no one should ever wish for, because its price is paid in human lives. The same category also holds its opposite, though: an unexpected peace, a reconciliation, a realignment that opens new doors, as 1989 once did.

It could even come from beyond our world. In 2023, NASA's independent study team found no evidence that unidentified anomalous phenomena have an extraterrestrial origin, and unidentified does not mean alien. Still, as a thought experiment, imagine an independently verified discovery of intelligent life elsewhere. Would our national and ideological differences suddenly look smaller? Or would fear and competition prevail? A shared event does not guarantee a shared response.

And it could be a crisis of truth itself. This very protest wave has already shown us how: fake or out-of-context videos were circulated on social media to exaggerate the chaos and violence in France. Conspiracy narratives such as "Project Blue Beam", which imagines staged supernatural events used to manipulate humanity, have no credible evidence behind them, yet they point to a real danger. In an age of deepfakes and synthetic voices, a large-scale deception accepted as reality could become a shock in its own right, and a world that can no longer agree on basic facts will struggle to solve even the problems everyone shares.

The Inner Black Swan

Which brings me to the possibility I believe matters most.

Not a Black Swan in Taleb's strict sense, perhaps, but a metaphor for the kind of extraordinary transformation we rarely dare to expect from ourselves.

Look again at Taleb's three criteria: an event outside our expectations, an extraordinary impact, and, afterwards, everyone saying it should have been obvious. Now imagine that the next turning point does not come from a virus, a war, a machine or a visitor from the stars, but from within us. Imagine people, communities and governments beginning to wake up in their consciousness, to see the impact they have on one another, to understand that responsibility is greater than authority, that cooperation does not require the disappearance of our differences, and that protecting each other is wiser than defeating each other.

It would lie entirely outside our expectations, because no forecast, no risk model and no news bulletin predicts it. Its impact would be extraordinary, reaching into politics, economies and the way we treat the person next to us. And afterwards we would surely say it had been obvious all along, because in truth it always was. Every great spiritual tradition, and every hard lesson in the history above, has been pointing us in that direction.

I call this the Inner Black Swan: the unexpected turning point that does not happen to humanity, but happens within it. Of all the Black Swans we have looked at, it is the only one we do not have to wait for, and the only one we can choose.

It does not need to begin with anything dramatic. A leader who listens before a conflict becomes a crisis. A government that recognises suffering before frustration turns into anger. A company that addresses a danger before someone is injured. A community that chooses cooperation before division becomes permanent. None of these looks like a historic event, yet together they can quietly change the future.

Perhaps the next turning point will be a choice

When I look back over the past two centuries, I see revolutions, collapses, wars, pandemics and discoveries. Some arrived with almost no warning; others followed warnings that were heard but not understood. And I notice that history remembers the event, while the future is shaped by what people decide to do afterwards. The Berlin Wall fell, but reconciliation still required human effort. Europe lay in ruins in 1945, but peace was built by people who chose to share what had once armed them against each other. The pandemic disrupted our lives, but what protected people in the end was cooperation, institutions and individual responsibility.

I hope the protests of this autumn will lead to dialogue and meaningful solutions just as those of 1848, 1968, 2011 and 2018 eventually did.But we must also not forget that History does not promise us that every crisis will end well. But it reminds us that even difficult moments can become opportunities for change. Something unexpected may also arrive and change everything, and history tells us we cannot rule that out. But we do not have to wait for a breaking point, and we certainly do not have to wait for a catastrophe.

So I return to the question that started this reflection. Must we reach a breaking point before we choose to change?

Perhaps the greatest Black Swan would not be another event that surprises humanity, but humanity finally surprising itself, by choosing wisdom before suffering makes it necessary.

fearnot.

Alin Budiu | #FEARNOT365 | fearnot365.netlify.app