I have often hypothesized that the human race’s obsession with velocity is merely a collective, subconscious attempt to outrun the stink of our own mediocrity. We build gleaming silver tubes, strap them to electrified rails, and hurtle ourselves across the landscape at speeds that evolution never intended, all so we can arrive at our disappointed families or soul-crushing mid-level management jobs twenty minutes earlier. And every so often, the universe—governed by the cold, unbribable laws of physics—decides to snap its fingers and remind us that we are nothing more than soft meat in hard metal cans.

So it goes in Andalucía. Spain has just witnessed its deadliest high-speed train crash since at least 2013, a statistic that the media is bandying about with the breathless excitement of a grisly sports announcer. "Deadliest since 2013," they chant, as if the intervening decade of relative safety was due to competence rather than sheer, dumb luck. It wasn't. We haven't gotten smarter; the probabilities just hadn't caught up with us yet. Now, in the sun-drenched south of Spain, the bill has come due, and as usual, the currency is human life.

I look at the wreckage—intellectually, of course, I have no desire to actually be there among the weeping bystanders and the breathless reporters in windbreakers—and I see the perfect metaphor for the European experiment. It is shiny, expensive, ostensibly progressive, and completely prone to catastrophic derailment the moment reality places a pebble on the track. The European Union loves its high-speed rail networks. They are the crowning jewel of a continent that likes to pretend it has solved the problems of the 20th century. Look how fast we go! Look how connected we are! And yet, when metal shears and gravity takes hold, we are reminded that underneath the subsidized gloss, it’s just the same old incompetence piloting the machine.

Let’s be clear: I don’t know the specific mechanical failure that caused this disaster yet. Nobody does. The investigation will take months, maybe years. It will involve men in suits sitting in air-conditioned rooms, staring at spreadsheets, desperate to find a scapegoat that isn't "systemic negligence." But I don't need a technical report to tell you why this happened. It happened because humanity is arrogant. We build systems of immense complexity and speed, assuming that our monkey brains—which are barely equipped to handle a sharp stick—can maintain them indefinitely without error.

Naturally, the political vultures are already circling. This is the part of the tragedy that truly makes me want to retch. The local officials in Andalucía, the national figures in Madrid—they will all rush to the cameras. They will wear their serious faces. They will offer "condolences" and promise "thorough inquiries." It is all performative theater. The Right will eventually mutter about funding or privatization, implying that if only a corporation owned the tracks, the profit motive would have somehow negated momentum. The Left will cry out for more regulation, ignoring the fact that you cannot regulate away the fundamental chaos of the universe or the inevitability of human error. They are both useless. They are parasites feeding on the wreckage, using the dead as leverage for their next polling cycle.

Consider the precedent. The year 2013 is being cited as the benchmark for horror here. That was the Santiago de Compostela derailment. Do you remember what we learned from that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. We mourned, we erected plaques, and then we went right back to demanding faster trains, tighter schedules, and cheaper tickets. We demanded the impossible triangle of speed, safety, and economy, and when the engineering compromised, we acted surprised. This crash in the south is not an anomaly; it is a punctuated equilibrium in a timeline of inevitable failure.

There is a grim irony in high-speed travel. We are so desperate to compress time, to shrink the world, that we end up erasing ourselves from it entirely. The passengers on that train in Andalucía just wanted to get from point A to point B. Instead, they were subjected to the brutal indifference of kinetic energy. And the rest of us? We will read the headlines, shake our heads, perhaps tweet a sad emoji to simulate empathy, and then book our next ticket. We will climb aboard the next silver bullet, bury our faces in our phones to ignore the trembling of the carriage, and pray that the driver isn't tired, that the sensors aren't corroded, and that the gods of speed are feeling merciful today.

I, for one, remain unimpressed. If you need me, I’ll be stationary, waiting for the rest of you to crash into the wall you’re racing toward.