Would I Rather Be Blind or Deaf?

[00:00:00]Recently, I was asked by a viewer whether I would rather be blind or deaf.

[00:00:05]And what motivated me to make this video was yesterday a member of my Discord server mentioned that they got into a car accident where I think an 18-year-old girl turned into him and totaled his car, and he was left with tinnitus, which hopefully recovered by now, but he said he had tinnitus um after the car crash, and I I've I've always known this, but life is extremely precious, and you never know when things will end or just go completely south. Like you can lose your hearing for all kinds of reasons. You can lose your vision for all kinds of reasons. And if you have intact hearing and vision, these are things worth being grateful for and appreciating. And life itself is inherently limited.

[00:01:02]I don't have perfect vision, 20/20 vision, and I think like even when I did have 20/20 vision, I realized that there were levels to vision. Like I wanted 20/25 vision, so I got contact lenses and glasses to let me achieve that.

[00:01:19]But with glasses, one thing that took me a while to realize is that they distort your field of vision and make you see things less accurately. And similarly with contact lenses, you can constantly feel them on your eyes, and they just don't feel natural. So, I mean, I don't have perfect vision. I think I have like minus 1.25 power for both eyes, something around that around there. I think my right eye is a little bit worse, and I have some astigmatism, but my vision is not terrible, and I don't actually wear glasses really ever. Um if I were to wear glasses, I would probably get um the Oakley Flak 2.2 XL because the curved lenses are way better for minimizing um peripheral distortion compared to lenses that are really flat.

[00:02:09]But, you know, when it comes to hearing, you can technically preserve perfect hearing for your entire life by just not listening to loud music and you know, being an audio engineer, audio scientist, I have subjected myself to a lot of loud sounds over the years, which has caused some high-frequency hearing loss. And right now, I have some tinnitus in both ears.

[00:02:35]In my right ear, I have a little bit more tinnitus in the higher frequencies.

[00:02:40]But, in most of the frequency range, I can hear perfectly fine and hear everything. And there's people with lots of hearing loss who just can't hear general everyday things and yeah, I mean, I recognize like, you know, listening to this EDM music, um the human ear is not designed for this and like doing this constantly will lead to more tinnitus and hearing loss. This is just a fact. And would I rather be blind or deaf to answer this video?

[00:03:17]Um I don't know. Like, right now, I'm effectively blind um with this mask on, it's going to be really hard to edit this video or do anything without being able to see um the result of my video. But, even if I was deaf, like, I could still speak into this microphone, I guess, but I wouldn't be able to monitor my own voice, per se, and wouldn't really I guess have a reference for if my speech was accurate or not, but at least I could see the waveform of my voice and something along those lines to monitor it.

[00:03:56]So, you know, even though this is an audio channel, I think I would rather be deaf than blind just because I think vision is overall a more useful sense.

[00:04:08]I think, yeah, both senses are incredibly important for survival in life, but >> [gasps] >> yeah, um I mean, audio is 360°. You can hear behind you, below you, above you, but vision you can only really see in front of you or at least in your direct um line of sight. You can move your eyes up, down, left, right, but you can't do this with your um ears, for example. Um they're they're stuck in place.

[00:04:40]Both senses are really incredible and obviously, you don't want to lose either one.

[00:04:47]And if I had to pick, yeah, I would rather keep my vision, I think, because I think it's more useful for survival.