What if everyone had crappy vision?

​Photo / CC BY-SA 2.0

​Dear Reader, 

It doesn't come up much in conversation, but I am visually impaired. Not bordering on blindness for sure, but impacted enough to make many routine activities a bit frustrating. 

I was born with impaired vision that can't be corrected. Sometimes people will make a comment to this effect: With vision like yours, it's so strange that you became an artist. 

I actually do get the sentiment, I've had similarly misguided thoughts myself. I put off becoming an artist because, in my mind, who is going to want visual art made by someone with significantly inferior vision. 

I don't remember the train of thought, but I had an epiphany this morning during meditation. What if everyone could see like me? What if everyone had crappy vision? 

Well for starters, signage would be a whole lot bigger. Road signs, price stickers, fast-food restaurant menus. Everything that helps people find their way around would be bigger. 

Smart phones wouldn't cram so much stuff on to one tiny screen, and fine print wouldn't be anywhere near so fine. 

Self driving cars wouldn't be experimental. They would be fully deployed, and everyone who could afford one would have one. 

In entertainment, video action scenes would slow down considerably. 

And my personal favorite - facial recognition software would become a portable must-have accessory. 

This is just off the top of my head but I'm sure you get the idea. 

In such a society where everyone has crappy vision, would anyone ask, with vision like that why did you become an artist? 

No, of course not.

It would never come up because crappy vision would be normal for everyone and people in that society would become artists for the same reasons that people in our society become artists. 

My vision is perfectly normal to me, and as long as I can still see then that's good enough to be a visual artist.  

Mirthfully yours,
Annie