April fool's day doesn't exist

Posted on: 1 April 2026

April Fool's Day is the one day of the year when everyone knows they might be deceived. They fall for it anyway, or pretend to, and afterwards everyone laughs. Consensual deception. Almost a form of collective affection.

The problem is that the ritual doesn't end on 2 April.

Look at what circulates every day: in markets, in boardrooms, in press releases. Stories built to be believed, not necessarily to be true. The difference from an April Fool's prank is that in November nobody laughs. Everyone pretends the official version corresponds to reality, that the declared incentives are actually the ones driving decisions, that the stated causes genuinely explain the observed effects.

I've spent forty years watching systems from the inside. Companies in crisis, markets in transition, organisations transforming or collapsing. You learn one thing early: most official explanations don't lie, they do something more subtle. They simplify until reality becomes digestible and stops being useful. Companies don't fail because of poor management; they fail because the incentive structure rewarded exactly those behaviours. Markets don't crash because of collective irrationality; they crash because every rational actor, following their own logic, produces an outcome nobody individually wanted. Leaders don't make bad decisions because they're incompetent; they make them because the system they operate in makes that choice the most reasonable one available at the time.

None of these mechanisms are obscure or difficult to see. They're documented, repeated, predictable. Yet the official narrative continues to win over the real mechanism, almost invariably until reality presents the bill.

Clinical analysis is simply the refusal to participate in the collective suspension of disbelief. It isn't cynicism. Cynicism is the shortcut taken by those who conclude that everyone lies without doing the work of understanding why. It's something slower and less comfortable: following real incentives rather than declared ones, looking for structural mechanisms before accepting moral explanations, testing every interpretation against what you actually observe.

An April Fool's prank works because the person who constructs it knows how it ends while the other doesn't. When it's revealed, there's that precise sensation: having been naive. What happens every day in public discourse has the same structure. With one difference: the reveal often never comes. Or it comes late. Or it gets absorbed into the next narrative without anyone laughing.

So no, no April Fool's this year.

Those who spend their days dismantling narratives, following real incentives rather than declared ones and testing every claim against reality don't need a dedicated day for consensual deception.

They do it all year. It's called clinical analysis.