SAILING ANGELS FOUNDATION

I see signs of the rise of in disability in so many stories and trends that pop up—often in contexts where the people writing about them fail to consider disability at all. I saw it in a (looong) article about how people are staying home more and socializing less that didn’t give one sentence in several thousands of words to how some of those people are stuck at home due to disability. I’ve seen it in posts on this platform about how people are taking more time off work—framing the trend as being about laziness or abusing unlimited PTO policies, without recognizing that people are sicker more often. Often, the writer talking about these trends points out that they started "around 5 years ago” without recognizing the specific thing that changed, oh, right around five years ago (do you need a hint? It rhymes with Ovid). ? For those of us living with disability, the degree and scale of this change in society is so obvious. Even for those who don’t have a chronic illness, virus “season” has expanded to all four seasons, with different viruses sometimes trading off supremacy, and sometimes all hitting in high numbers at once. People are getting sick more often, and many aren’t fully recovering. And our work culture has failed to properly catch up to the trend. For all the hot takes about generative AI, this is the big change I see re-shaping society and work culture in the coming years. ? For now, it’s still easy for those who haven’t been touched by this rise in disability directly to not even see that it’s happening. I appreciate how clearly this simple graph from the New York Times (based on census data) shows how significant and stark the increase is. (And FYI—COVID isn’t the only virus that can cause disability, research has shown that pretty much any virus—the flu, EBV, even the common cold—can trigger ME/CFS. Mine was most likely caused by the flu.) ? We desperately need a better approach to PTO policies, better disability benefits, and a better social safety net for those that can’t work. But while your average individual doesn’t have too much power over those things, something you can do is at least be aware of the trend. Be more understanding of people needing more time off and seeking disability accommodations. As long as our response to pandemics and endless virus seasons is to pretend they’re not happening (and especially if vaccines become less accessible, which is looking likely right now) those needs will only grow. You’ll want people to be understanding when it happens to you. ? ?