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Re-pinging the jury due to thread move - don't pay attention to my post!
@Faelwen
@Halidom
@Roseangel2
@Shadowfire9
@SugarRush

Blindness would have an enormous impact. You'll be a zombie. Always arms forward or else you bump into everything. Having to wash your hands so often that your skin will turn granny. Why? You can't see. You'll have to touch everyone and everything for recognition. And all beauty will be thrown out of your life.
Never again TV or video games (*shiver*). No more cooking (seriously, I don't have to explain that one, now do I?). No more shopping, or your home will be rainbow colored in no time. Your life will constantly be in danger, because when someone yells "Watch it!", well, you get the idea.

Going deaf would be somewhere in the middle, I guess. But life would be so boring without music. Always needing subtitles while watching TV, or you'll have no idea what's going on. And you can't ask the person next to you, because you wouldn't hear the answer.
I can see the advantages, though. No more listening to that babbling aunt. Being able to sleep no matter how many parties they're throwing in the neighbourhood. Although you probably will keep sleeping. Unless they re-invent the alarm clock.

Going mute would give the fewest problems. I'm not a person who gives for idle chatter. And if I want to say something, my writing is quite readable. I would still be able to do all the things I like to do: drawing, reading, gaming, writing... Being mute wouldn't be very life-changing, at least not for me. Friends and family would know. And I'm too shy to talk to strangers anyway. I only see a problem if I have to ask directions in the rain.

So my answer is definitely "going blind". We don't need our voice or hearing for getting around. We're not bats. Thank God. What a racket that would be.


(Edited for a typo. Whoops.)

Choosing between becoming mute, deaf, and blind is an extremely hard choice for anyone to make. Whatever you give up, you're making it hard to communicate with others. It is easy to figure out how speech and hearing are important in communication- talking lets somebody share ideas, and hearing lets a person comprehend what another person is saying without textual communications.

However, blindness would make communication harder in the world we live in today. I communicate mostly through the computer or through the phone. On touch-screen phones (which I have one of), you have to be able to see the screen to be able to tell what you're typing in. I understand that not everyone in the world has a smartphone, but most of the people I communicate with do: especially the people in my generation.

Blindness has other disadvantages in society, too; learning becomes much more based on listening (which can be hard to do for long periods of time). You have to be dependent on others to help you, which can be degrading. Still being a high-schooler makes me hyper-aware of how if you aren't at least becoming independent, you're cast off as a social outsider, someone who doesn't have many friends and is less responsible.

This is why I think blindness would cause the most disruption in my life; school would become much harder, I would still be a social outcast in the eyes of my peers (which I'd like to say doesn't get to me at all, but it can), and I'd probably be miserable in general, as it makes all of the things I love to do (play hockey, make art, go online) that much harder.

You must choose between going blind, going deaf, or going mute. Which one would cause the most change to your daily routine?

I would have said going mute, as I'm a talkative person, or going deaf because I listen to music almost constantly, but I think going blind would change my routine most. Writing, gaming, and drawing are my hobbies, the last two of which rely heavily on sight, and I game and doodle almost every day. Being blind would drastically alter the way I have to learn to perceive and interact with things, and in some occasions I may have to be dependant on others. Even what I'm doing this very moment - that is, typing out a response on a forum - would have to be done differently.

I would say Blind. I use my sight out of all my senses and if I am blind it would be hard for me to use a computer, play videogames, and read.

It's also my first way to discern emotion among other people so... yeah Blind for sure.

Plus I am a bad listener sometimes and depending on that would really disrupt my life.

Ah, here comes the disability activist answering the question without really answering it... please note, I haven't read any other answers, so my observations are based on the age-old question and how I've heard people answer, not aimed at anyone in particular in this thread.

I disagree with the premise of the question. It often frames being blind, deaf, or not using your voice in complicated ways and creates a hierarchical system where people say they'd rather be deaf than blind because it would be "easier" and so on. Not to mention the difficulties of the overlapping categories... some deaf people are what abled people would call "mute", for instance.

Seeing a disabled body as capable of the same daily routine is difficult for most abled people. The idea of taking pleasure in a disabled body is nearly impossible. People make the decision in a sort of "which would be least disastrous" or "which would be least horrible", based on the limited stereotypes of these disabled bodies and lives perpetuated through popular opinion and media -- do you start to see the problem?

In my experience, most people answer that they'd rather be deaf when presented with a choice between deafness and blindness. This catastrophizes blindness and makes it seem like the worst possible option, when in reality, my daily lived experience would be little different. I'd still get up, shower, cook breakfast, take the bus, go to work, go grocery shopping, and so on. I've known blind people who drove boats and cars with a sighted narrator, and blind people still read and so on. This also makes light of hearing loss, as most people say they'd "miss music" (though deaf people still enjoy music -- look it up if you don't know how) but would "just learn ASL" (try learning a new language with a completely different grammatical structure before saying it would be an easy endeavour).

Disability is not about lacking anything -- your sight, hearing, or voice. I appreciate that the question isn't phrased with the usual careless language, but the premise is still such that it encourages the usual range of reactions to disability: pity, inspiration porn, gratitude that they are abled, and objectification of disabled bodies and lives.

I am not any better, stronger, or somehow more human because I am deaf. I am not more capable in my other senses such as sight. I am not someone to hold your life against in gratitude for your own. I am not inspiration for you to do X, because if even I can do X, then surely you have no excuses.

My daily routine would be different in very minor ways if my disability were different, but so would yours be if you lived in a different house, had a different job, or were a fan of a different sports team. Yes, my disability is a critical part of my identity, but it is also an everyday fact, and that's a complicated balance to hold. In my experience, a bunch of abled people trying to keep that balance never ends well.

Choosing between sight, hearing and speech is very tricky! However, I think losing my ability to speak would effect me the least as I don't talk very much as is. I would learn sign language or carry a little dry-erase board and it wouldn't be that difficult for me as most of my conversations happen virtually anyway.

With that out of the way, I believe losing my hearing would effect me the most. While I do use devices for almost everything I do and being blind would take that away, sound is most important to me out of the three. If I were blind I could still watch shows with my family, listen to music, and play with my toys and hear my kitten calling for me, but if I were deaf I'd feel as if I were in a completely different world. A much bleaker one. Without my hearing I'd be unable to enjoy the sound of the frogs chirping after a storm, or the sound of waves at the beach. I can go without seeing those things, but being unable to hear them would be devastating to me.

As a child I would pass time by "seeing" what it would be like to be blind by closing my eyes and trying to follow my mother in the grocery store by sound, a favorite shopping trip pastime of mine. I never bumped into anything because I could hear where things were. I never did this same test with my hearing though, as it's just too important to me. As I'm writing this, I can hear that my mother has come home from the grocery and is now talking to my father and putting the food away. If I couldn't hear that it could be a while before someone tapped on my shoulder and informed me that we had food again and I could go get breakfast.

I'd also like to think that even if I were blind I'd still be able to play some of my favorite games, such as minecraft, entirely based on sound. Granted with the case of minecraft they might need to program in a "bumping-into-walls" sound, but for the most part it would likely be alright. Of course, I would certainly still be able to play that game if I were deaf, but I like hearing too much. If I were deaf I'd be unable to fall in love with someone's laugh or do a dramatic reading with a friend.

In summary of all that, I primarily use sound to identify who people are and what they're feeling, I use hearing to convey my surroundings almost all times of the day, and I use hearing to bond with people over tv shows, movies, and games. I guess you could say that without my hearing I would feel blind.

EDIT: After reading the post above mine I feel kind of silly for writing all of that! I'm not disabled but I'm trying to understand what it might be like given some of my more mental handicaps, and I guess really if I wanted to trade my ADHD for blindness I would have to say I wouldn't do it, because I've already coped with having ADHD and though it's hard in its own way I already dealt with it and being blind or deaf would be difficult in a different way but at the same time I know I'd eventually find a way to live with it like anybody else with that. I know ADHD is not exactly on par with losing a sense but it's the only thing this able bodied person has to compare with. Anyways, my answer to the question is still that I'd hate being deaf the most out of the three given in the question, but that isn't to say that I think being blind or mute would be a piece of cake either! I said above that I could "just learn sign language" if I were mute but I know full well that learning a language is really difficult to do and I should rephrase that as "I would eventually learn sign language assuming I wouldn't give up on it". Now I don't think this exactly makes up for the question being asked or my answering it, it's merely my take on things as of the moment I write this out. I also don't exactly think the poster will read this either but that's fine; I wrote this because I felt like it and the post above made me think about some things I felt like adding.

First of all, let me congratulate the people who wrote this question on giving me a scientific drive to test it.

I started by walking around with a blindfold. I whacked my knee on the coffee table. Later, I spilled coffee on my keyboard, and it took about ten minutes for me to find a rag to clean it up. On my way to put the coffee stained rag into the laundry, I tripped over some statue of a short dragon holding a sphere that I forgot that I had.

I also tried putting in ear plugs (and at first that was going great) until I started to smell something. Apparently I hadn’t heard my dog barking, and she really needed to use the bathroom. When nature’s call was too irresistible, she went on my favorite rug.

And if that wasn’t bad enough, I during my mute test I suddenly realized that you cannot ask others to clean up your dog’s messes for you, especially your stinky ones. My sign language was terrible, at best, and I could not even convey what needed to be cleaned.

I concluded that all options are equally damaging to my daily routine. My leg still throbbed. Perhaps if I were blind, I would not see the steadily growing red bruise blooming on my shin like a flower. Blessing, or curse? Maybe if I were blind, I would not see the stain on my favorite rug, a brown splotch that distracted from the delicate interweaving of fabric and pattern woven together. But the sight of such things was not the true horror, it was the smell. The smell of defeat in the face of science, no hypothesis proven or disproven, no results that could be repeated. That, and the lingering stink my bad dog had made on the rug.

But my olfactory sense was not to be tested or included in this endeavor, so I shoved those thoughts aside. Was I to pick arbitrarily? Doing so would not be good science. I pondered it more. How could I function without eyes to examine test tubes and mathematical equations? How could I exert my brilliant mind for the good of others if I could not communicate my ideas?

Although my lack of hearing rendered me oblivious to the accident unfolding on my rug, I deduced that unless I was performing sonar or echolocation tests in dragon caves that I would still be able to function, if to a slightly lesser extent.

I sighed, decision made, and reached for a cup of coffee. It was only half-full. The bitter tang assaulted my mouth but I was used to it, and even enjoyed it. Taste… now that was definitely something that I could not live without.

For science, of course.