Myopia is the tendency to overvalue immediate consequences and undervalue distant/less obvious ones. It’s what gets people to prefer today’s comfort over tomorrow’s outcome; and my dog nearly died because of it.

I spent the Fourth of July in Maine with my parents and our 9-year-old dog, Penny. We were staying in our riverside log cabin during the heat wave.

She was panting more than usual. She snores every night and had recently been to the vet for breathing issues, where she was declared a “healthy girl,” so nobody was especially worried. We assumed she was just uncomfortable in the heat.

Our cabin doesn’t have any AC, and by 2am she still couldn’t settle down. I woke up to check on her and became a bit worried.

My myopic decision making kicked in. Should I wake up my parents, research vet ERs nearby, get everyone on board, and spend hundreds of dollars for a visit… just to be told she’s fine? Nobody else was especially worried, and my folks are the ones who watch her 24/7, so maybe I was just tired/misguided. Or should I listen to rationality and make the decision that optimizes for the best possible outcomes?

It’s a surprisingly a common class of decisions. Where the best possible outcome of inaction is saved effort, and the worst possible outcome is something really bad. Buying insurance, backing up your computer, having difficult conversations, etc. The cost of action is usually uncomfortable but fine, and the cost of inaction can be potentially catastrophic.

I don’t analyze my regular life in this way as often as I should. I order fast food and stay up late. I skip workouts. I constantly make decisions that optimize for short-term comfort instead of long-term benefits. But suddenly when it’s not my life that I’m taking into consideration, the choice is obvious.

I called a nearby vet, convinced my parents that we should do something, and got her seen at 3:30am. Her oxygen levels were dangerously low, and it turns out she had an undiagnosed case of pneumonia. She spent some time in an oxygenated room and got discharged a few hours later. The doctors said that if we didn’t act, it might have been her last night.

Penny is on antibiotics and finally able to sleep. She’s still a little sniffly, but she’s eating her food and her tail wags when people walk into the room. A sign of a happy dog. I’m grateful that I decided to visit home and that everything ended well.

Realistically, I can’t make every choice with pure reason. But whenever I do, I usually feel better about having taken action, even if it amounts to a net-neutral outcome. If the vet told us that Penny was just running a little hot, I might have felt a little upset that we spent money and didn’t get good sleep. But the clarity would have been worth it.

Penny’s home and comfortable because I refused to gamble with irreversible downside. It’s time I start doing that less in other aspects of my life, too.

When I see people doomscrolling during a transitory period (ie. a waiting room, on the subway) I can understand and relate to wanting that time to pass you by. I still feel kinda lame when I look around on the train and see myself surrounded by people all thumb swiping, just like me, at the same time. But I get it.

When I see others scrolling, say, on the beach while their dog is barking at them to play, or while the bartender fixes their drink on a night out, or between conversations at a friend’s birthday party, it saddens me for two reasons.

The first is that it seems like they’re waiting to die. Not consciously. But it’s the thought that the current moment is so uninteresting that it may as well not be happening at all. That they need to go searching for the next post RIGHT NOW to honor the fleeting nature of the algorithm’s next curated post, without regard for the fleeting nature of the memory in front of them.

The second is that I get this sudden and total lucid realization that I’m guilty of doing the exact same thing. My first instinct is to say to myself “Man, that person needs to look around” and my next thought is “I really should have listened with my eyes more today, too.”