Because a black swan event has occurred, life is anything but normal right now, and people are generally concerned about things that are far more important.
I agree with your premise, but let's just not forget that we're humans with a limited life-span and our brains aren't used to dealing with events that happen this rarely. It's understandable why we may all have been caught off-guard. It's a "black swan" relative to our understanding of life.
A Black Swan in this context would be a shock to the system that no one saw coming nor could see coming. For instance a change in the sun which would drastically warm or cool the earth far beyond the effects of CO2. Maybe a natural disaster or an industrial accident that had a cascade effect that would reach beyond what anyone could have seen coming. You can't do anything about either of these things but that won't stop people from suggesting it could have been avoided with the right (or more of): "fill in the blank with your favorite solution to all problems in life."
Look I’m no social psychologist but I don’t think this is unstudied or surprising stuff? It’s generally known that humans are incredibly good at getting used to bad things that happen in a regular/routine/predictable manner. Eg deaths from cancer/cars/smoking/domestic violence/Covid/etc don’t make the news, despite happening in large numbers. It’s unpredictable suffering that jolts us - volcanoes, air crashes, shootings. It’s just the way we are.
If I had to guess(but what do I know) it’s part evolutionary - predictable risk can be managed, avoided, plannned for, controlled. Unpredictable is new and thus much more threatening.
It seems very difficult for many (most?) of us to accept that outlier events in our lives are generally more random good or bad luck, rather than something caused by our actions.
Generally, humans are very good at "it won't happen to me" denial. And kinda-morbidly curious about the misfortune of others. And always looking for "the one little trick". And...
Bad shit happens to a minority of people every day, permanently disrupting their lives and forcing them to abandon long-term plans. The majority remain oblivious and see an enduring status quo.
Suddenly a Black Swan craps on everyone at once, and a great many people are whining 'why is this happening to me' and 'when will someone fix this so I can go back to my routine'.
Guess what? Your routine is probably fucked. Throw it out, get used to the new normal, and accept that no one knows how to fix this (yet?), just like every other time we get hit by a context-changing problem.
Of course some people get too attached to their context, and those who come later and find their remains might label such events as 'out-of-context problems'...
Thanks, that's much closer to the mentality of many people that are accused of having Stockholm syndrome: they value predictability above something with possibly unexpected results, that might be better or might be worse. The fact that they can't see that this is limiting them to never escape their situation is harder to see.
It's likely grey cause folk hate to be reminded of the human condition to think: "it won't happen to me" & the follow-up "when it does I'm surprised and mad".
I think it's likely just part of human nature. When something bad or tragic happens, we want to know what happened and why. It seems plausible that there's an evolutionary explanation for it, to do with learning how to avoid such happenings.
Everyone has their own peculiar mental model of reality, sometimes more optimistic, sometimes more pessimistic, almost always with strange boundaries on the thinkable universe.
I estimate this is how the majority of bad financial situations happen, whether untenable mortgages, huge credit card bills, excessive student debt, etc.
People are usually not fundamentally stupid or poor decision makers, but they do usually ignore uncomfortable thoughts.
It's easy for that to happen to one person; it's more surprising when it happens to dozens of people.
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