Trying to practice the stoic† idea of negative visualization some.
One of the worst things I can imagine is being blind. It would interfere with so much and make so many things harder. A few short examples of stuff that immediately occurs to me:
- Just getting around (even your apartment, forget about outside) is harder and you have to learn skills for doing that while blind.
- Stuff like cooking seems a lot more perilous.
- Obviously you can’t drive or even ride a bike normally (though re: bike-riding, there is this, which I didn’t know about before this exercise).
- Needing to deal with some of the current technology/systems for reading would suck.
- Can’t experience things like the beauty of a sunset, or the visual information in movies, or any art with a visual component really. Can’t even have direct awareness of what things like color mean.
†I saw a comment on reddit disputing whether negative visualization is a traditional stoic practice or whether it’s just the idiosyncratic practice of a particular modern stoic (William B. Irvine). I haven’t referred to the primary sources yet to sort this out.