Welcome back to another Question of the Week here at The Confusing Middle! The last two weeks gave us wallets, actual and hypothetical, and what we’d do with them when nobody was checking. This week trades money for something you can’t hand back or lose track of on a sidewalk. It’s a heavier question, and I want to be upfront about that before you’re three paragraphs deep and wondering where the fun went. Some weeks this series is going to sit in a harder chair than others.

Here’s this week’s question, again from Gregory Stock’s The Book of Questions.

If you were fated to be in a bad accident that would leave you either blind, deaf, or with amnesia that wiped away all your memories, which loss would be the worst? The easiest?

I want to sit with this one honestly instead of rushing to an answer, because my first instinct and my considered answer turned out to be two different things, and the gap between them is basically what this whole post is about.

My First Instinct, and Why I Don’t Fully Trust It

My gut says blindness or deafness would be the worst, and amnesia would be the easiest. The logic feels airtight the moment I say it out loud. If I woke up blind or deaf, I’d know exactly what I was missing. I’ve had a full life of sight and sound to compare it against, so every silence and every dark room would come with a built-in ghost of what used to be there. Amnesia feels different in a way that almost sounds like cheating to admit. If the accident wiped out my memories entirely, I wouldn’t know what I’d lost. There’d be no grieving process for a version of my life I couldn’t remember having. You can’t miss what you don’t know is gone.

That argument has a certain cold comfort to it, and I think it’s the reason this particular framing of the question shows up so often. It’s tempting to treat ignorance as a kind of mercy. But the more I turned it over, the less convinced I became that “you wouldn’t know what you lost” is actually the same thing as “the loss would be easy.” Those are two very different claims wearing the same sentence.

What the Research Actually Says

There isn’t a single tidy field study for this question the way there was for the wallets, so I went looking in three different directions instead, and each one complicated my gut answer a little more.

The first is a genuinely famous piece of research from psychology, a 1978 study by Philip Brickman, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. They interviewed 22 major lottery winners, a matched group of controls, and 29 people who had been left paralyzed by accidents, and asked all three groups to rate their happiness. The lottery winners weren’t meaningfully happier than the control group, and they actually took less pleasure in small everyday moments than people who hadn’t won anything. The accident victims, meanwhile, didn’t rate their current happiness as high as the controls, but nowhere near as low as most people would predict for someone adjusting to paralysis. They also tended to view their own past more warmly than expected, and reported more optimism about their future happiness than the lottery winners did about theirs. The whole point of the study, sometimes called the hedonic treadmill, is that people are strikingly bad at predicting how devastating a major loss will feel a year or more out, because we underestimate how much we adapt.

That connects directly to a second body of research, the work of psychologist Daniel Gilbert on what’s called affective forecasting, our attempts to predict our own future emotions. Gilbert and his collaborators have run study after study showing that people consistently overestimate both how intensely and how long they’ll suffer after a negative event, whether that’s a breakup, a job rejection, or a serious diagnosis. One of the specific, well-documented findings from that body of work is that healthy people reliably overestimate how much becoming disabled would hurt their long-term well-being, a pattern researchers describe as robust across many different studies. In plain terms, the version of blindness or deafness my gut is picturing right now is very likely worse than the version I’d actually go on to live with a year from now.

The third direction surprised me the most, because it pushed back directly on my assumption about amnesia being the “easy” option. There’s a real, if smaller, body of neuropsychological research on people with severe amnesia, and one of its more consistent findings is that identity survives memory loss far more intact than pop culture suggests. Researchers studying patients with profound amnesia, including foundational work by Stanley Klein and colleagues, have found that people frequently retain what’s called semantic self-knowledge, meaning their basic personality traits, their sense of who they are as a person, even when they’ve lost the specific episodic memories that would normally justify that self-image. Procedural memory, the physical, practiced skills like walking or playing an instrument, tends to survive too. What gets lost most severely isn’t the self. It’s the specific, textured record of the life that built that self, the faces, the names, the particular Tuesday afternoons that never seemed important until they were gone. That’s a very different kind of loss than “you won’t know what you’re missing,” and honestly a much sadder one, because you might still be fully yourself and simply unable to locate the people you love inside your own memory of them.

A Different Kind of Loss on Screen

Last week I mentioned Amélie, and the week before that, It’s a Wonderful Life. This week I keep coming back to a much more recent film, Darius Marder’s 2019 drama Sound of Metal. Riz Ahmed plays Ruben, a punk-metal drummer whose hearing starts failing suddenly and irreversibly in the middle of a tour. The film doesn’t treat his deafness as a plot device to feel sorry for. It sends him to a rural sober house for deaf people, run by a Vietnam veteran named Joe, played by Paul Raci, where the guiding belief is that deafness isn’t something to fix. It’s something to learn to live inside of.

What makes the film land so hard is that Ruben resists that idea for most of its runtime. He researches cochlear implants in secret, convinced that getting his old hearing back will get his old life back too. When he finally gets the surgery, the film doesn’t give him the triumphant return to sound he was chasing. What he hears instead is distorted, overwhelming, wrong in a way that plain silence never was. The last image of the film is Ruben sitting alone on a bench, finally taking off the implant and just sitting in the quiet he spent the whole movie running from.

I keep thinking about that ending next to the research on hedonic adaptation and affective forecasting, because Ruben’s whole arc is basically a dramatization of both. He assumes, the way I assume about blindness or deafness, that the loss is the worst possible outcome and that fixing it is the only path back to being himself. The film’s argument, quietly and without a big speech about it, is that he was never going to find peace by reversing the loss. He finds it by adapting to it, the same unglamorous, underestimated process the Brickman study found in its paraplegic interview subjects decades earlier.

Where I Land

So which is worst, and which is easiest? I think my gut had the two reversed, or at least oversimplified. I don’t think amnesia is the easy option anymore. Knowing that your sense of self, your basic personality, is likely to survive is genuinely reassuring, but the specific things amnesia takes, the faces of the people who love you, the memory of falling in love with them in the first place, the small unremarkable days that quietly built a life, feel less like an escape hatch and more like a different, quieter kind of devastation. You wouldn’t grieve those things because you wouldn’t know to. Everyone around you would be grieving them for you instead, watching you not recognize what used to matter most.

And I think blindness or deafness, as brutal as the immediate adjustment would be, comes with something amnesia doesn’t: the research suggests I’d adapt more, and sooner, than my gut wants to believe. The version of the loss I’m afraid of right now, the permanent, unrelenting grief my imagination is supplying, isn’t the version the data says most people actually go on to live.

I don’t have a personal experience with losing sight or hearing completely, or with the kind of amnesia this question describes. But I have watched people I love lose pieces of their sight and hearing gradually with age, and I’ve watched someone I care about slowly lose parts of their memory over time, not all at once the way this question imagines it, but a little at a time, which comes with its own particular ache. Watching memory erode slowly is different from what the question is asking, but it’s given me some sense of how much of a person can remain present even as specific memories start slipping. That’s probably part of why the amnesia research surprised me instead of just confirming something I already believed.

Your Turn

So here’s the question back to you. Blind, deaf, or amnesia with no memories at all. Which one, if you had to choose, feels like the worst outcome to actually live inside? And which one, if any, actually feels easier once you sit with it instead of reacting to it? I’d genuinely love to know if your gut and your considered answer match, or if they pull apart from each other the way mine did.

Let me know where you land on this one in the comments. Until next week, this is Aaron, at The Confusing Middle, grateful I only have to think about this one hypothetically.

Feature Photo by Boys In Bristol SmokZ