DRMacIver's Notebook
Restrictions
Restrictions
I’m staying on the 16th floor of a hotel at the moment. When I arrived, this was a pleasing novelty. Buildings are rarely this tall at home so I thought it was neat to have this casually be a thing.
Then the fire alarm went off yesterday and I had to walk down 16 flights of stairs. I was less pleased by the novelty after that.
(It turned out to be a false alarm, but I only found that out on the ground floor)
It occurred to me belatedly that in actual fact I probably shouldn’t stay on the 16th floor of a hotel, because there’s no guarantee of my ability to walk down 16 flights of stairs. As I sometimes half-joke, it’s not that I’m disabled, I just sometimes can’t walk. It doesn’t happen often, but maybe once every few months with no warning my right knee goes and I can barely walk on it, and I would have really struggled to make it down all those stairs if that had happened.
On top of that, today I am paying the cost of that with a significant increase in the chronic pain in my right leg. My hip in particular really doesn’t like me right now. Although I was able to walk, it comes with genuine consequences.
I hadn’t thought about this before because tall hotels are largely outside of my experience, so the thought never occurred. But not it has, and I am aware of the risk. So, taking this new knowledge into account, in future I should probably make a particular request when staying at hotels to stay on a lower numbered floor. It’s the safe and responsible thing to do.
I’m not going to do that.
Part of this is just not wanting to overcorrect on rare events. I think this is the first time I’ve had a fire alarm in a hotel I’ve stayed in, and I’ve stayed in quite a few hotels. A rare event happened and no terrible consequences occurred. This is a lousy prompt to create a policy. Life doesn’t need more organisational scar tissue.
Granted, asking to be on a lower floor isn’t a big deal (though it would have required significantly more interaction with the hotel than I did before arriving), but the aggregate effect of many things that are individually not big deals adds up to quite a lot of effort.
But more than that… adding many little restrictions and accommodations results in a much smaller life. In the capacities post I talked about how having a car lowers the activation energy of many things, and so it’s not just that it’s easier to do the things you were doing before, you do things that you wouldn’t previously done. Adding restrictions makes many things that would previously have been worth it not.
Food is like this for me. I love eating out, and I love trying new cuisines, but the difficulty of satisfying my dietary restrictions means that I lose a lot of upside (many delicious things I can’t eat) and experience a lot more downside (risk of digestive problems, awkward high effort interactions with staff) and this means that many things are not worth the effort.
Individually, the losses are small. In aggregate though it makes quite a meaningful impact to my life.
I’ve no great attachment to staying in tall hotels, but it’s quite nice - it’s a pleasant novelty, and I enjoy the view. It would be no great loss if I never did it again, but I do think the aggregate effect of choosing to avoid these sorts of minor risks for an increase in effort and a decrease in novelty would end up large, and would result in a smaller and less lived life.