Not at the threat. At each other.
During the COVID period, when the virus still seemed distant, the biggest worry was whether the person across the dinner table thought you might be overreacting or underreacting. In Berlin, February 2022, a situation unfolded where friends with Ukrainian colleagues found themselves avoiding conversations with friends who believed the invasion was “not our problem.” This moment highlights how perceptions and concerns shifted as the reality of the situation became more personal and urgent.
And it happened in Dubai in late February 2026, when Iranian missiles lit up the sky and the city split, almost overnight, into two camps: those who stayed, performed normalcy, and mocked the ones who left, and those who left, often in panic, and mocked the ones who stayed as delusional.
I watched this from multiple time zones, speaking with people I know on each side. What struck me was not that people reacted differently. That’s human. What stood out was the speed, the ferocity, with which each group turned the other into the enemy. The missiles were still flying, and the real war had already moved indoors.
This essay isn’t about Iran, or COVID, or Ukraine. It’s about what every crisis reveals about how we relate to each other under pressure. It examines the psychology behind the sideways glance and highlights a pattern I’ve seen repeat so consistently across so many situations that I no longer see it as just a reaction but as a form of structure.
The Wiring Underneath
Let me start with the basics. The human stress response hasn’t changed since the days in the savannah. Fight, flight, freeze. What psychotherapists have added in recent decades is a fourth: fawn. The compliance reflex. Agree, appease, do whatever the group seems to want from you. This last one matters more than most realize because it explains a lot of what appears to be calm during a crisis but is actually something entirely different.
The amygdala, the part of the brain that handles threat detection, doesn’t distinguish between a predator and a push notification. An ambiguous headline about rising tensions triggers the same hormonal response as a physical danger. Norepinephrine. Cortisol. Adrenaline. The body reacts accordingly.
The difference is that modern crises never fully resolve. A pandemic lasts for years. A geopolitical threat simmers without a clear end. This ongoing activation, a threat without closure, is what makes our era psychologically unique. The body remains prepared for something that never quite arrives and never fully leaves.
I’ve observed this pattern in everyday situations. A SaaS company I advised went through a prolonged funding drought. The CEO looked composed. The team mirrored it. Everyone kept speaking in the language of discipline, focus, and prudence.
But the quality of decisions deteriorated. Meetings got longer. Commitments got softer. Projects stalled without being formally killed. Budgets were cut without a clear operating plan. Talented people started looking elsewhere. External partners felt it too. Recruiters stopped getting clear signals. Agencies were told to pause, wait, reduce scope, or “hold for now.” What appeared calm was something else entirely. It was freeze wearing the clothes of professionalism.
In founders and executives, freeze rarely looks dramatic. It rarely looks like panic. More often, it looks like another meeting, another request for more data, another week of hesitation dressed up as strategic thinking. Fight and flight are both movements. Freeze is different. Freeze burns time, drains morale, confuses teams, and signals instability to everyone around the business.
And because companies do not operate in isolation, that paralysis spreads. A founder who stops spending without making real decisions does not just disrupt their own company. They destabilize the recruiters, agencies, freelancers, consultants, and operators built around them. Fear at the top becomes friction in the market below.
Personality plays a huge role, with research on the Big Five traits showing that neuroticism can lead to greater emotional distress during tough times. On the other hand, extraversion, especially the friendly and communal kind, tends to be linked with smaller physiological stress responses. However, personality is just one piece of the puzzle. What’s even more important is how prepared you are.
People who have mentally practiced worst-case scenarios, made concrete plans, and been through crises before, knowing their own patterns, respond with a much different kind of calm. Not the rigid, fragile calm of denial. Instead, they exhibit a flexible, adaptable calm of someone who has already done the thinking.
There is a term for this in psychology: defensive pessimism. People who set low expectations, vividly imagine what could go wrong, and then use that rehearsal to prepare. They perform well not despite their worry but because of it. Researchers even found that forcing defensive pessimists into positive moods made them perform worse. Their system requires working through the darkness. I have met versions of this person in every industry and every geography. They are rarely the loudest in the room. They have a packed bag, a plan, and no need to tell you about either.
The person I find most interesting, though, is the one drinking champagne on the balcony while the sky lights up. That person gets a lot of attention, and almost all of the analysis about them is wrong.
The Loudest Fear Response in the Room
I want to be clear about this because I’m not interested in mocking anyone. I’ve been calm during a crisis, and I’ve also been panicked. What I’ve never done is ridicule someone for ending up in a different place than me. When I see that, my question is never “who is right?” My question is: “What is that hostility defending against?”
Terror Management Theory, one of the most thoroughly tested frameworks in social psychology, provides an explanation. It suggests that humans cope with the fear of death through three buffers: cultural worldviews that give meaning, self-esteem gained from living in accordance with those worldviews, and close relationships that affirm both. When death becomes prominent, when it shifts from an abstract concept to a tangible reality (such as during a pandemic, a war, or a missile in your peripheral vision), these buffers activate intensely.
You don’t just cling to your worldview more strongly…you also attack anyone who threatens it.
The mechanism has layers. Proximal defenses are conscious: “I am healthy. I am smart. I will be fine.” Meanwhile, distal defenses are unconscious, such as increased tribalism, harsher judgments of out-groups, and a tendency toward strong leaders who convey certainty. Both the scared person and the dismissive person are driven by the same core process, just through different channels.
This is why ridiculing someone else’s fear is not just rude…it is revealing. Reaction formation, where someone might overstate the opposite of their true feelings, is a well-known defense mechanism in psychology. For example, someone responding to a crisis by going to the mall, ordering champagne, posting about it, and then mocking “the panickers” isn’t just staying calm: it’s showing off an exaggerated calmness. This kind of behavior can feel compulsive and stiff, as it struggles to accept opposing emotions in others, which might threaten their overall sense of stability.
Layer in a downward social comparison. When people feel helpless, they tend to compare themselves favorably to those they see as worse off. For example, thinking, “I am calm and rational. They are hysterical,” can provide three psychological benefits at once: it boosts self-esteem, creates an illusion of control, and helps deny the reality of the threat. Research shows that this behavior has a downside: during crises, those who engage in downward comparison are often less likely to take proper precautions. Feeling superior to others who panic might be one of the least helpful ways to respond in a crisis.
I recognize this pattern. I have seen it in founders whose companies are failing, projecting casual confidence while their numbers collapse beneath them. I have seen it in expat communities during COVID, where people competed to appear the most unbothered. I saw it in Dubai in early March 2026, in the LinkedIn posts thanking leadership with “suspiciously vague explanations” about feeling safe, and in the influencer declaring from her living room that she felt safest in the world even as missiles were being intercepted overhead. The need to demonstrate the absence of fear is itself one of the loudest fear responses in the room.
And here is what makes it truly dangerous: it is contagious. Not the calm, not the suppression. When the social norm becomes “we do not acknowledge the threat here,” the people with legitimate concerns fall silent. Information stops flowing. Collective intelligence deteriorates. You end up in a room, a company, or a city where the unspoken agreement is that everything is fine, and anyone who questions it is not just wrong but disloyal.
What the balcony champagne posts share with the frozen founder is a cousin impulse: where freeze stops movement entirely, fawn performs whatever movement the room seems to demand.
Three Crises, One Script
I’ve seen this pattern happen three times over the past six years. The surface details change, but the structure stays the same.
COVID revealed the clearest divisions. Within weeks of the pandemic’s start, the world split into tribes. Pro-lockdown. Anti-lockdown. The labels appeared quickly: “Covidiots” for the defiant, “Sheeple” for the compliant. Research showed that political identity influenced health behavior more strongly than demographics, personal risk, or geography. Each side’s mockery only strengthened the other’s resolve.
Being called a covidiot made people more defiant, not less. Social psychologists called this “political sectarianism.” It involves othering, aversion, and moralization. Changing your mind was not about updating your view; it was seen as betraying your tribe.
The research on panic buying tells you everything you need to know about how crises travel sideways. People did not stockpile toilet paper because of the virus. They stockpiled because they saw others doing the same. Perceived scarcity, created by observation of others’ behavior, was the strongest predictor. Personality accounted for roughly ten percent of the variance.
And here is the detail that sticks with me: stronger social connections during quarantine were linked to worse well-being and increased panic buying. Social interaction became a means for contagion, not the emotional kind, but the behavioral kind.
The Ukraine invasion followed the same arc on a continental scale. A study tracking 1,341 people across 17 European countries, with 44,894 repeated assessments, found a significant decline in well-being on the day of the invasion, with countries closer to Ukraine showing stronger and more sustained drops. Distance modulated everything. A German watching the coverage processed it as a geopolitical event. A Pole processed it as a personal threat. Same television, different nervous systems.
Germany’s response fascinated me. The concept of “Zeitenwende,” the turning point, signified a foreign policy identity crisis. Decades of beliefs were shattered overnight. Yet months later, a quarter of Germans still did not see Russia as a military threat. That shows a deep normalcy bias at a national level.
The compassion fatigue for Ukrainian refugees followed a pattern so predictable that migration experts had almost written the script: initial solidarity, then normalization, then economic worries, political manipulation, and finally, a gradual loss of support. I saw this unfold in real time in Berlin. The yellow-and-blue flags were taken down from balconies before the first winter was even over.
Then Dubai. Late February 2026. When Operation Epic Fury launched, and Iran retaliated with nearly a thousand drones and close to two hundred ballistic missiles targeting the UAE, the city’s safe-haven narrative got a big crack in just one single night. I know people who were there. The spectrum of reactions was breathtaking.
At one end, a German influencer declared Dubai the safest place in the world. Telegram’s CEO claimed it was statistically safer, even with missiles flying, than European cities. Emirati officials touring Dubai Mall projected business as usual. At the other end, wealthy expats paid six figures for private security convoys to Riyadh. Chartered jets. Pets abandoned at shelters because their owners could not get them on flights.
An Australian influencer posted a video from her hotel balcony, wearing a white bathrobe and missiles visible in the sky behind her. “I’m scared,” she said. “It’s not meant to be happening here.” The backlash was ferocious. That single sentence, “it’s not meant to be happening here,” became the symbol of everything critics had said about the Dubai bubble. A British newspaper published a cartoon captioned “Dubai expats having their first ever geopolitical thoughts.”
But what I noticed most was what came after the initial reactions. Within days, the crisis about missiles had become a crisis about each other. The people who stayed mocked the ones who left. The people who left mocked the ones who stayed.
The pattern across all three crises is identical. The initial reaction to the threat gives way to a secondary crisis about how we react to each other. During COVID, the virus was eventually overshadowed by the war between maskers and anti-maskers. During the Ukraine invasion, the humanitarian response was overshadowed by debates about compassion fatigue.
In Dubai, the missiles are being overshadowed by the social conflict between those who stayed and those who left. Each secondary crisis deepens polarization and impairs the collective capacity to address the primary one.
The secondary crisis is always more damaging, not in terms of body count, but in causing long-lasting harm to the social fabric. COVID-19 has been brought under control, yet tribal wounds remain unhealed. Ukraine’s front lines have stabilized, while Europe’s compassion fatigue continues.
Dubai’s missile defense intercepted most of the incoming fire. The crack in the safe-haven narrative could have irreversible economic consequences.
The Boardroom Version
Every founder and every CEO I have worked with recognizes these dynamics instantly when I describe them in geopolitical terms. The irony is that they often fail to see the identical patterns inside their own companies.
Organizational decline follows the same architecture. A company faces a crisis. Insiders who predict failure change their behavior in ways that accelerate it. But inside companies, the most costly response is often neither panic nor overreaction. It is paralysis.
A founder freezes, but calls it caution. A leadership team delays decisions, but calls it alignment. Spending is cut, but no direction is set. Projects are paused, but no priorities are clarified. Hiring stops, but no structural redesign follows. This is where fear becomes expensive. Not because people are emotional, but because they stop moving while pretending they still are.
The doom loop: crisis, undisciplined reaction, panic-driven pivot, disappointment, more panic. And the contagion works exactly as it does in cities. One employee loses sleep, starts resenting their manager, and communicates negatively. Teammates absorb it. Performance degrades.
The same thing happens outside the company walls. Vendors sense hesitation before leadership admits it. Agencies see retainers shrink without explanation. Recruiters are asked to keep searching for roles that may no longer exist. Consultants are kept in limbo while decision-makers wait for certainty that never arrives.
What begins as freeze inside one leadership team creates avoidable turbulence across an entire commercial network. The original market pressure may be real. But the secondary disruption is often self-inflicted.
The thing everyone feared starts becoming true, not because the market made it inevitable, but because the internal response made it so.
I have sat in company meetings where the most dangerous person was not the pessimist flagging real problems. It was the CEO insisting everything was fine, shutting down questions, projecting confidence that had no relationship to the numbers. Leadership defensiveness. Reactive decision-making. Communication shutdown. When leadership goes quiet or punishes honesty, employees construct their own narratives. And those narratives are almost always worse than reality.
The research on what works is unambiguous. Leaders who acknowledge uncertainty while providing structure outperform both the deniers and the panickers. The concept, called “holding” and borrowed from psychoanalysis, involves containing distress and interpreting confusion. Not fixing everything. Not pretending nothing is broken. Creating a space where fear can be expressed, information can flow, and diverse reactions are treated as data rather than disloyalty.
The prerequisite is psychological safety, and the key finding is that it must be established before a crisis. A long-term study of over 27,000 healthcare workers showed that psychological safety created before a crisis offers lasting protective benefits, reducing burnout and improving retention even during severe resource shortages. Trust cannot be quickly built in the moment. It is an infrastructure.
The organizations that withstand crises best are those that invested in this infrastructure when it seemed unnecessary, when conditions were good, and when no one was asking for it.
Dubai itself now functions as this case study at the city scale. A city of ninety percent expatriates, people who chose to be there and can choose to leave. The economic model relies on exactly the population most likely to leave during a crisis. When the departure mindset takes hold, it creates the same downward spiral: panic, capital flight, economic decline, more panic.
Beirut was the region’s international financial capital before its civil war. Bahrain took that role afterward, followed by Dubai. Each transition was based on the same promise: stability. The promise was genuine until it wasn’t.
What Distance Does to Danger
Operating across Dubai, Europe, and Asia has shown me that geography is more than just logistics. It is psychology.
There is a framework in psychology called Construal Level Theory that explains something every globally mobile person has experienced firsthand: how distance changes how a crisis feels. Psychologically near events trigger detailed, emotional, action-focused processing. Psychologically distant events become abstract, analytical, and emotionally subdued. This is why a German watching Ukraine coverage perceived it differently from a Pole. The same conflict, viewed from different perspectives.
The expat experience adds a unique layer to this. Living in Dubai during missile strikes, you’re geographically close to the crisis. However, as an expat, you’re socially detached from it. It’s not your conflict. Your passport provides an escape. This dual position of proximity combined with detachment creates the distinctive nature of expat crisis behavior.
The “bubble” isn’t just a metaphor; it’s a real psychological state caused by the option to leave. That option alters the entire situation and leads to an ongoing cost-benefit analysis that locals don’t face. Whether that appears as rational flexibility or rootless privilege depends entirely on the observer’s perspective.
Cultural programming adds another layer. High uncertainty-avoidance cultures, Germany and Japan being prime examples, gravitate toward structured crisis management and formal protocols. Lower uncertainty-avoidance cultures favor flexibility. The UAE scores high on uncertainty avoidance, which may explain its structured approach to crisis communication.
Put a multinational team in Dubai during a crisis, and you will see German employees wanting clear protocols, British employees wanting transparent communication, Emirati employees rallying around institutional leadership, and American employees making individual risk-benefit calculations. Same crisis, same room, fundamentally different psychological responses shaped by cultural wiring that runs deeper than any corporate training can reach.
And then there is the distinction between risk and uncertainty. Most real-world crises are not calculable risks. They are genuine uncertainties. Key variables unknown. Probabilities incalculable. Research from the Max Planck Institute shows that in uncertain environments, simple heuristics, rules of thumb, often outperform complex analytical models.
The person frantically calculating missile-interception success rates is treating the crisis as a math problem. The person who packed a bag and identified three exit routes is matching their response to the actual nature of the situation.
After 9/11, the fear of flying drove Americans to drive instead. Researchers estimated roughly 1,600 additional road deaths in the twelve months that followed. Fear of the vivid, catastrophic event led some people to choose a more dangerous form of travel.
I think about this every time I watch crisis reactions unfold in real time. The miscalibration between what we fear and what actually harms us is not a bug. It is a feature of how our brains process threat. And it operates in every crisis, in every culture, in every boardroom.
The Reaction to the Reaction
What I have learned, watching this pattern across continents, crises, and company collapses, is that the most dangerous moment is never the threat itself. It is what happens between people when the threat arrives.
A genuinely calm person does not need to silence anyone. They do not need an audience. They do not need to post about it. Their calm is functional, not theatrical. It adjusts when new information arrives. It can hold space for someone else’s fear without treating that fear as a personal insult.
The person performing calm, the champagne on the balcony, the LinkedIn post thanking leadership, the aggressive insistence that everything is fine, is doing something different. They are defending against their own terror by constructing an identity position around the denial of it. And the energy required to maintain that position makes them hostile toward anyone who reminds them that the threat is real. The mockery is the tell. Genuine calm does not require ridiculing others.
I say this because understanding the difference might be the single most helpful thing I’ve come across for navigating a time of increasing crises. Preparedness-focused calm is adaptable, steady, and quiet. Denial-focused calm is inflexible, performative, and loud. One adjusts. The other inflates the situation.
The environments that endure, whether they are teams, companies, cities, or friendships, are the ones where fear can be voiced, uncertainty can be acknowledged, and different reactions can be seen as information rather than betrayal. Every environment that suppresses this, through social pressure, corporate messaging, or even threats, suffers the consequences in reduced collective intelligence and faster descent into harmful cycles.
I don’t know whether Dubai will recover its narrative, and I deeply hope it does. I don’t know whether Europe processes the identity crisis that the Ukraine war exposed, while I deeply hope it does. I don’t know what the next crisis will be, only that it will happen and the pattern will repeat.
What I do know is that the most dangerous response to a crisis is not fear. It is the need to perform its absence. And to punish anyone who reminds you there might be something worth fearing.