There is a certain kind of person who thinks a vacation involves sleeping on the dirt. They call it 'getting back to nature.' They leave their perfectly safe, climate-controlled apartments in the city to go sit in a plastic bag on the side of a mountain. And then, when the mountain decides to move a few inches to the left, everyone acts like it is a shocking surprise. This week, New Zealand reminded us that nature does not care about your vacation plans. A landslide hit a campsite, and the results were as predictable as they were sad.

New Zealand has spent decades building a brand. They want you to think of their islands as a giant, green playground. It is the place where people go to look at pretty hills and pretend they are in a movie. The government markets the outdoors like it is a safe museum. They put up little signs. They build little paths. They tell you where to park your car and where to pitch your tent. It is all very organized. It makes the modern human believe that we have finally put a leash on the planet. We think that because we have a GPS and a fancy jacket, the Earth has agreed to be our friend.

But the Earth is not your friend. The Earth is a giant rock that is constantly shaking, melting, and sliding. A landslide is just gravity doing its job. When a hill gets too wet, it falls down. This is not a secret. It has been happening for billions of years. Yet, we still let people sleep at the bottom of these hills. We call it a 'campsite' and charge money for it. We treat a dangerous slope like it is a hotel room. This is the kind of bureaucratic stupidity that makes me want to stay in my house and never look at a tree again.

Think about the process here. Some government office sat down and drew a map. They looked at a piece of land and said, 'Yes, this is a great spot for people to sleep.' They probably did a safety check. They probably had a meeting with coffee and biscuits. They looked at the mud and the rocks and decided it was safe because it had not fallen down lately. This is how the human mind works. We think that if nothing bad happened yesterday, nothing bad will happen today. It is a childish way to look at the world. We treat the laws of physics like they are suggestions that we can ignore if we have the right paperwork.

And what will the response be? We already know the script. There will be an inquiry. There will be a team of experts in bright vests walking around with clipboards. They will talk about 'soil stability' and 'unprecedented rainfall.' They love that word: 'unprecedented.' It is a fancy way of saying, 'We didn't think this would happen, even though it happens all the time.' They will write a report that is three hundred pages long. It will conclude that we need more signs. Maybe they will move the campsite fifty feet to the right, as if that will stop the next million tons of mud from finding them.

We have created a world where we think we can regulate everything. We have rules for how fast you can drive. We have rules for how you build a house. We have rules for how you sell a sandwich. So, we assume there are rules for the mountains, too. We think that if a place is open to the public, it must be safe. We have lost the basic animal instinct that tells us not to sleep under a giant pile of loose rocks during a rainstorm. We have traded our common sense for a sense of entitlement. We think we have a right to be safe, even when we are standing in the middle of a wild, changing landscape.

This is the tragedy of the modern intellectual age. We are so smart that we have become completely stupid. we have mapped the entire globe, but we still do not understand that the globe does not want us here. We build our lives on the edges of volcanoes and the sides of sliding hills because the view is nice for our social media feeds. We value the 'experience' more than the reality of staying alive.

I am not surprised by the landslide. I am surprised that we are still surprised. The mud does not care about your tent. It does not care about the 'New Zealand brand.' It does not care about the safety meetings or the clipboards. It just goes where gravity tells it to go. Until we realize that we are just small, fragile guests on a very grumpy planet, this will keep happening. We will keep crying about the 'tragedy' while ignoring the fact that we were the ones who decided to sleep in the path of a moving mountain. It is a comedy of errors, but nobody is laughing.