The 5 Senses

Let me start by apologizing for the lack of recent material. It took me all of last week to recover from the heavy drinking that occurred the previous weekend. The debauchery included a victory for the Silver Spoonman and friend in a "March Madness of Beer Pong" tournament. Bad Ass. Anyways, I am not angry today so I will be going against the grain and writing about an interesting hypothetical as opposed to complaining about some crappy thing like the lottery (which by the way I STILL have not won).

If the technology existed to harness one or more of your senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell) and then remove it and give it to another person, would you sell any of your senses and how much would it take?

I'm gonna go ahead and rank the senses in order of how I value them as well as give you reasons why I would not want to give them up and reasons why I would want to sell them.

1. Vision: Kindof a no brainer for me here. Not being able to hear would be really bad, but not being able to see would be the worst. Can't watch the NFL. Can't look at eye pastries. Reasons 1a and 1b are enough by themselves to prevent me from selling my vision for any price but in case you remain unconvinced, you can't drive, you can't walk around without risking destroying your shins, you pretty much can't do anything you do now. Not good at all. So even if you gave me a billion dollars, I still wouldn't sell my sight because I couldn't really enjoy my life and my billion dollars if I couldn't see.

2. Hearing: This was a close call for me but I'm putting hearing a touch higher than touching. I'm a big music fan, so not hearing music would be a drag. Also, you'd have to learn sign language and you'd have to make all your friends learn it too. Except when all your friends drink as much as mine do, you'd probably have a bunch of friends who would not learn sign language. So, no music, far less efficient communication, potential to go insane with the whole no noise thing after having lived 20+ years with constant noise; add that all up and I don't think I'd sell my hearing for any price.

3. Touch: As mentioned, touch almost made it to #2. Why? The Orgasm (sfw). Without a sense of touch, you cannot get off. This would be awful. And it's not like you'd lose interest in the opposite sex all of a sudden. You'd just forget what it was like to have that oh so wonderful feeling. This would be a constant source of torture. The only good thing I can think of about losing your sense of touch would be the inability to get hot/cold and feel pain. But even that could be a bad thing because you'd never know if you were about to get hypothermia or a stroke. So all in all, losing touch = bad news. I would not sell sense of touch for any amount.

4. Taste: Now we get to the third tier of senses. I love food and I love the taste of good booze. But if I were offered 100 million dollars I would give up my sense of taste really quickly. First of all, without your sense of taste, you wouldn't want to eat awesome unhealthy foods because they would no longer taste awesome to you. This way you could eat only healthy foods, keeping yourself in better shape and also probably prolonging your filthy rich life. I think my reservation wage for giving up taste would be about 10 million after tax dollars. I understand that I'll never be able to taste a good steak or a good beer ever again, but 10 million after tax dollars will allow me to never work again. And never tasting again is a price I'm willing to pay to live the Ultimate American Dream. Plus if you sold smell in addition to taste, you'd have no problem being this guy.

5. Smell: The weakest of the senses, smell is like the Detroit Lions of the all-senses NFL. You know they're gonna be bad every year and they really don't even have any bright spots. Smell has nothing to bring to the table in my opinion. The only bad things about not being able to smell are A) a dulling of your sense of taste 2) you can't tell if you are in desperate need of a shower (although you should probably figure that out some other way) and D) you can't smell smoke in your burning building (I tried really hard to find a clip to help out anyone who doesn't recognize the Buzz McCallister reference there but youtube failed me). I would sell my sense of smell for 50 grand.

So that about does it for me and my senses. If you find this at all interesting (or even if you don't) tell me how much you'd want for your senses. I'll try to get angry about something for my next post. Until then, keep playing the lottery.

-Silver Spoonman