Thinking Out Loud: Don't Take Things for Granted

I've been having trouble breathing because of allergies. I've always had allergies, but it never affected my daily life in such a way that made me reflect on the things I take for granted. The title says it all after all, but I will nevertheless elaborate on it.

The Fallacy of Invulnerability

There is a mental model or fallacy that says something will not happen to us, without any background or reason whatsoever. That happens all the time, but it's a real eye-opener when you realize it.

I already wrote about the time I got facial paralysis and how that many-months experience changed part of the view I had on many things. For one, I gained insight into how my stepdaughter struggled with stuff I couldn't understand before. To put yourself in the shoes of someone else is regrettably not always possible. At least most of the time with stuff that really matter.

Learning the Lesson Again

Something I may have realized but forgot again is that you should not take things for granted. At least I, for one, shouldn't.

I'm relearning this regrettably again, as if all the lessons until now were not enough. Now it's not as extreme as last time, but incapacitating nonetheless.

And here I am again, reflecting on how I had taken things like breathing for granted. Because of allergies, I'm having trouble breathing, and it is worse than I thought. I have known people with asthma (although I've not been diagnosed with that), but having trouble breathing without coughing has had several consequences in the last days. One is not being able to sleep. If you wake up every 30 minutes for a 5-minute coughing session, after a couple of those you no longer want to sleep. And there you are, at 4 or 5 am, thinking about what you can do.

The Things We Never Think About

The thing is all that I've taken for granted. I move by bike all the time, and I use a helmet (because I want to keep being able to bike). But this issue makes that harder. When I got the temporal paralysis I could not completely close one of my eyes. That meant I had to use eye-drops to hydrate, and that it hurt riding the bike as I couldnt do anything against the wind. I managed to solve that using a help with a visor. And there I realised that, although the eyes are really important, there are not that many helms with a visor integrated. You may think a bicycle glasses would do the trick. They don´t, at least for my use case. And I tried a lot of them. I finally found an ALPINA SOHO VISOR, and that solved my issue. I still use it even now, although I can close my eye again. It protects my eyes from wind, insects and dirt, and works great with my normal glasses. Why do I write this? Because until the moment I had an issue with my eyes, I never even thought about how useful a Helment with an integrated visor could be.

I work using the computer, and for that I use a lot of senses. I have to see, hear, breathe, and touch. All things I never think about, until I have an issue with one of them (like not being able to close my eye). If one is missing you have to adapt, and that is a lot of effort. If two are missing, it gets harder. But what about having issues with all of them? In that case you cannot adapt by yourself. You have to depend on others. And not just to adapt your way of working, living and being, but you also have to depend on others to consider your use case.

Let's take for example the accessible web. How accessible is a website? Can it be read in high and low contrast, with screen readers? Do your images have descriptive and helpful alt texts? Do you have ARIA labels? There are a lot of variables that make a website accessible or not. It's the same for many other things.

Let's say you have a physical disability and little strength. A heavy door won't allow you to enter or leave a place. You have trouble in your knees and cannot go up the stairs? You will at some point stop trying.

Building a World for Everyone

Regrettably, most of the world is built and set up by people that are used to taking things for granted. Myself included sometimes. You realize such things when there is construction on the street that leaves no space for a wheelchair. Or when there are stairs without a railing to help yourself. You see this also in pharmaceuticals, where the instructions and contraindications are so small people with difficulty reading cannot read them at all.

When you build while taking things for granted, you are building a world that only works for people without any issues. And there are no such people. You may think nothing will happen to you, and I hope that it doesn't. But I thought the same and I've been proven wrong again and again.

Even if just for being egoistic and thinking about how to help a future self have fewer problems should anything happen to you, it is always good to not take things for granted. Your future self will be grateful, as one thing that is sure is that everyone gets old.

Of course, doing this implies higher cost and more resources and time, but you should at least think about it. Sometimes the difference is not so big and you will open a door for those that are in different situations you haven't even thought about. And this will be a lot of trial-and-error if you haven't being in those situations yourself. Just remember that your experience pool is filled with successes and failures. I know for one that I still have a lot of work for this site to be accessible.

That's all for this reflection. Mostly this was to remind myself of this and give it some thought.