Caution: Avoidable Consequences

For anyone who’s ever picked a fight instead of taking a nap.

How many of you remember that Lifebuoy ad from over a decade ago?

It was part of their Help A Child Reach 5 campaign - a touching, cleverly devastating spot that claimed millions of children in rural India die before the age of five from diseases like diarrhoea and pneumonia. Deaths that could be prevented by something as simple as washing your hands with (Lifebuoy) soap. That ad lodged itself in my mind then. And even now, on a luteal-phase afternoon like this one, it still has the power to move me to tears.

It was designed to shock - and it did. But what struck me most wasn’t the death itself. Death from diarrhoea, for most of us watching on our living room TVs, still felt like a distant concept - something that happened far away, in other families. What stayed with me was that it was avoidable - and how insultingly simple the solution was. Just soap. Just water. Somehow, that made it feel worse.

It got me wondering - maybe avoidable consequences aren’t limited to death. I often notice other kinds - quieter ones, scattered across ordinary days. The ones that don’t make headlines. The kinds that happen at dinner tables, in WhatsApp chats, on long walks with friends - not fatal, but quietly damaging all the same.

Avoidable arguments with our mothers. Friendships that thinned out from neither of us texting first. Apologies held back until they curdled. Silences that hardened into distance.

What if, like public health campaigns, we had a dashboard for those? A way to measure the emotional equivalent of hand-washing.

What if we had an annual round-up with a graph showing you’re down 40% on needless defensiveness this year. That you had seven avoidable arguments with your partner, four moments where a deep breath could’ve changed the tone, three times you misread someone’s silence as rejection - and, one childhood friendship salvaged because you reached out instead of sitting in silence.

Maybe some solutions are as simple as soap and water. Like counting to ten before responding to a text that stings. Asking “What do you mean?” before assuming the worst. Taking a nap instead of picking a fight. They’re small things. But so was hand-washing.

Maybe this is just hindsight talking. It has always been a smug know-it-all voice that chimes in after the damage is done. Everything is painfully obvious in retrospect. But maybe there’s comfort in the idea that not all pain is inevitable. That not everything has to end the way it does. That sometimes, we’re more in control than we realise.

How many preventable consequences did you face this year? And how many could have been avoided with a little more sleep, one more deep breath, a splash of cold water - and who knows, maybe even some soap.