As if it could never happen here

Here's the trick the mind plays. A nurse knows, in general, that staffing falls apart and good plans collapse on a bad night. A contractor knows, in general, that clients walk and inspections fail. We all know, in the abstract, that things go wrong at work. Then a specific thing goes wrong — our thing — and we react as though we'd been promised it wouldn't. The shock isn't that failure exists. The shock is that we'd quietly exempted ourselves from it.

Seneca kept returning to a plain idea: misfortune isn't an intruder breaking the natural order, it's part of the order. Winter brings cold; harbors bring storms; a working life brings the deal that dies and the project that flops. He told a friend to send his mind out to meet these things in advance, so that when they came they arrived as expected guests rather than ambushers (Letters 107, idea). Nothing that belongs to the job can fairly astonish the person doing the job.

That doesn't make the loss welcome. It makes it recognizable — and recognized trouble is half-disarmed before you ever deal with it.

You didn't get singled out by bad luck. You got included in the ordinary terms of doing real work.