South Africa does not only shape what happens to people. It shapes how people move through the world before anything has even happened. That difference is subtle, but once you begin to notice it, it becomes difficult to ignore. People are not only responding to events. They are preparing for the possibility of events, and that preparation becomes part of how they live.
I notice this most clearly when I travel. Years ago, as part of my work, I began traveling internationally, and I still do so every second or third year. What has stood out to me over time is not so much the places themselves, but what happens in my system when I arrive in certain environments.
There are contexts where, almost immediately after stepping off the plane, something shifts. It is subtle, but unmistakable. My body relaxes. My awareness softens. It is not that I stop paying attention, but the sense that I need to stay ahead of something begins to fall away. I can walk without scanning every movement around me. I can sit without thinking about where I am positioned. There is space in my attention that I do not realize I have been holding until it becomes available again.
And that contrast becomes most visible when I return home.
As the plane begins its descent into Johannesburg, something starts to change. It is not loud or dramatic, but it is there. A quiet tightening. A shift in posture. A sense that it is time to be ready again. By the time I step off the plane and move through the airport, that awareness is already active. When I step outside, it is fully online.
I am paying attention in a particular way. I am reading people, movement, space, intent. I am not only in the environment. I am slightly ahead of it, anticipating what might change. Nothing has happened, and yet my system is already engaged.
When you place this alongside the realities of the country, it makes sense. South Africa continues to record more than 20,000 murders a year, with roughly 70 people killed every day. Many people do not feel safe walking alone at night, and a large number of households experience theft, intrusion, or violence over time. These are not distant statistics. They are conditions. Over time, the brain adapts to those conditions. It becomes more attentive to potential threat. It begins to prepare earlier.
What people are responding to is not only the numbers themselves, but what those numbers represent. Violence is not abstract. It is something people know about, hear about, and in many cases experience directly or indirectly. There is a quiet, often unspoken understanding that harm is possible, and that life can shift quickly and without warning. That awareness does not need to be consciously articulated to shape behavior. The system registers it and adjusts.
You can see this in ordinary moments. Walking into a parking lot involves a scan that happens almost automatically. Driving up to a gate brings a brief projection of what might go wrong. Sitting at a traffic light at night carries a small calculation about positioning and timing. Even at home, there is often a check, a brief sense of confirming that everything is as it should be. None of this feels extreme. It feels normal, which is precisely why it goes unnoticed. It is simply how things are done.
There is another shift that is easy to miss, because it sounds so ordinary.
It shows up in how we speak to each other.
I have started noticing it in myself. As a child, you would say goodbye, or cheers, or ciao, and that would be enough. The interaction would close there.
Now, more often than not, there is something added.
“Be safe.” “Drive safe.” “Message me when you get home.”
It slips in almost automatically.
It sounds like care, and it is. But it is also something else. It is a quiet acknowledgement of the environment we are moving through. We are no longer only saying goodbye. We are accounting for risk. But this does not stay confined to physical safety.
The same system that scans a street or a parking lot begins to scan the broader environment. People are not only asking, “Is this space safe?”
They are asking:
“What happens if fuel goes up again?” “What happens when costs rise and my income does not?” “How long before this reaches me?”
These are not abstract questions. They are quiet calculations happening in the background.
If petrol increases, transport increases. If transport increases, food increases. And suddenly, the margin tightens.
And underneath that, a more difficult question begins to form.
“How long can I hold this?”
Layer onto that the reality of unstable employment and the growing awareness that work itself is shifting, and the system extends even further into the future.
“Even if I am okay now… will I still be okay later?” Nothing has happened. But everything is already being prepared for. At that point, vigilance is no longer only physical.
It becomes existential.
None of these thoughts are irrational. In many ways, they are responsible. They reflect awareness. But over time, they begin to accumulate, because the system is no longer only managing what is happening in the present. It is trying to manage what might happen in the future.
Research helps to explain why this becomes so demanding. The human brain tends to find uncertainty more difficult to tolerate than known negative outcomes. When the future cannot be clearly mapped, it compensates by generating possibilities, running through different scenarios in an attempt to regain a sense of control.At the same time, anticipatory anxiety means that the body begins to prepare for potential threat before anything has actually happened. The result is a state of ongoing readiness that is not tied to a single event, but to the possibility of many.
At that point, what builds is not only stress. It is something closer to existential pressure. The question shifts from “am I safe right now?” to something broader and more difficult to answer. Will things be okay over time? Can I rely on what is ahead? Am I building on something stable, or something that could shift under me?
One way of understanding this is through the OODA loop: observe, orientate, decide, act. Under normal conditions, this loop responds to reality. Something happens. You make sense of it. You act. And the system resets. In environments like ours, it does not reset.
It runs ahead.
You are not only observing what is happening.
You are observing what could happen.
You are not orientating to a single reality.
You are orientating across multiple possibilities.
You are not making one decision.
You are holding multiple decisions in mind at the same time.
This is what I describe as Parallel Vigilance.
It is the experience of running multiple versions of possible outcomes at the same time, even while you are engaged in the present. It is not something people consciously choose. It is how the system adapts to sustained uncertainty and risk.
The cost of this is easy to miss, because it does not present as a breakdown. People continue to function. They work, they provide, they make decisions, they carry on. From the outside, everything appears intact. From the inside, however, there is an ongoing demand on attention and energy. Even when nothing happens, the system has already been working. It has already anticipated, adjusted, and prepared. It is not the presence of danger alone that becomes exhausting. It is the continuous preparation for it.
And even then, preparation does not resolve the issue. Reality does not always follow what was anticipated. Something slightly different happens, and the system adjusts again. It recalculates and prepares once more. Over time, this creates a pattern where readiness never fully switches off.
You begin to see the effects in small ways. Patience shortens. Reactions become quicker. It becomes harder to fully disengage or rest. The system remains partially active, even in moments where it could, in theory, relax.
The question is not whether vigilance is necessary. In many situations, it clearly is. The question is what it costs to live in a way where vigilance never fully switches off.
Because what is not recognized tends to continue.
And what continues tends to accumulate.
You see it in how people move.
You see it in how they think.
And, if you pay close enough attention, you start to hear it in how they speak. We say goodbye differently now.