Stop Calling It An Accident
When I was a kid, I burned down a massive anthill in my grandma’s yard. Yes, in the 1980s, children’s chores included gasoline and matches.
I soaked the hill, tossed in a match, and stood back with a shovel in case anything caught fire that wasn’t supposed to. I wanted every last ant dead. When the flames started to die, I grabbed the gas can and poured more fuel on the fire.
It worked beautifully.
Until it didn’t.
Back then, gas cans were one-gallon metal tins with rubber hoses attached to threaded caps. When I poured gasoline onto the flames, the fire climbed the liquid stream and ignited the hose.
I stomped it out immediately. And then I stood there imagining an A-Team-style explosion if the fire had reached the can itself.
When I told my dad what happened, he asked me one simple question: “Did you learn anything?”
He followed it with the standard reassurance: accidents happen.
But deep down, I knew that wasn’t true. It wasn’t an accident. It was predictable.
Had I paused for even ten seconds and thought about what gasoline does in the presence of flame, I could have foreseen the exact scenario that played out. The outcome wasn’t random. It was the natural consequence of my decision.
Another memory. My cousin and I were roughhousing in Grandma Lou’s house. She warned us to knock it the hell off. We pretended to listen. Then we kept going.
Thanks to the WWF, we were highly trained in responsible living-room wrestling. At one point, mid-air, I had the clear thought: “Oh no. Grandma’s going to be so pissed.” Then I crashed into the shelf and shattered one of her favorite vases, a vase so important it had its own shelf.
After the yelling subsided, the word surfaced again: Accident. But was it?
We were warned. We assessed the risk in real time. We ignored it.
That’s not accidental. That’s negligent.
Driver’s education hammered this idea home, though we never framed it honestly. The classic example: backing out of a driveway and hitting a child’s bike. “An accident,” they’d say. Then they’d teach you to perform a full 360-degree walkaround before operating a vehicle.
Which quietly acknowledges something important: The event isn’t random. It’s preventable.
And that word, accident, is doing dangerous work.
The dictionary defines accident as:
An unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally.
An event that happens by chance or without apparent cause.
Without apparent cause. That’s convenient. Because most things we call accidents have very clear causes. We just don’t like naming them. The waitress who drops an overloaded tray. The driver who bumps a parked car while texting. The cart that rolls into another vehicle because someone was too lazy to return it. These aren’t cosmic acts of chaos. They are foreseeable outcomes of human decisions.
And here’s why it matters: When we label something an accident, we soften accountability. We detach outcome from action. We cushion the emotional blow. We blur justice.
In nuclear and high-hazard operations, we don’t do that. We study human fallibility obsessively. We analyze decision trees. We mitigate predictable failure modes. Because when the stakes are high, pretending something was “just an accident” is itself negligence.
And yet in daily life, we hide behind that word.
Accident.
It’s an emotional airbag.
But ask yourself this: If a child crashes into a vase, it’s an accident. If someone pours gas on a flame and nearly ignites a can, it’s an accident. If a car plows into a motorcyclist because the driver didn’t look twice, didn’t pause, didn’t think, is that an accident?
Insurance companies call it one. Lawyers call it one. We all call it one.
But is it really?
