Chapter 3 of 9

A billion dollars for both your eyes

Let me make you an offer, and I want an actual answer rather than a polite one.

If I asked whether you want to be a billionaire, every hand in the room goes up. Every time, in every room, with no hesitation at all, which tells you the wanting is real and not a pose. So here is the deal. I will give you a billion dollars. In exchange I take your eyes, both of them, and you are blind for the rest of your life.

Take a second with it before you answer, because the instinct is to treat it as a riddle and it is not one. It is a price check.

A billion dollars, and you never see anything again. Does anybody take that deal?

Nobody does, and everybody knows why instantly. So what's the point of having a billion dollar? You cannot see anything. The money was never the thing, it was the thing you were going to use to get other things, and the moment you trade away the apparatus that experiences them, it turns into a number in an account that nobody is enjoying.

Which means you already know what your eyes are worth, and it is more than a billion dollars. You priced them in under two seconds and you have never once thought about it before today. That is worth noticing, because it means the valuation was already in you and you have simply never been asked to read it out. A Toyota Corolla has a cost. You got your heart, your mind, your brain, everything, for free. That is either a coincidence worth ignoring or it is the most important fact about your situation, and I have already told you which way I read it.