As I go through my life without glasses, for the first time in a long, long, long time, I find myself feeling liberated, yet strangely vulnerable.
For the most part of my considerable adult life, I have been shielded by a visible barrier which helped me see the world better yet protected me from its full glare. I tried contact lenses once – for one day and I gave up. There are some things I am persistent about, this was not one of those times.
I first realised I needed glasses when I kept failing my arithmetic in class. My teacher, ever more hopeful than me, suggested I had my eyes checked. Imagine my relief when I was told I was merely short-sighted, not dumb. Turned out however my mathematics only improved marginally with corrected vision. Some things just cannot be helped.
A month ago, I had eye surgery – some kind of lens implant. It’s a new procedure that corrects everything so that you don’t ever need glasses, whether it to be see near or far. I feel like I’m in an episode of “Black Mirror”.
Truthfully, I hardly recognize myself. The first time I looked in the mirror without glasses, I felt naked. I realized how much I had aged and also how much everyone around me had too. The only true democracy really is ageing – yes, you can fight it with weapons of beauty – but there’s no holding back the years.
No one recognizes me anymore too. One morning, at breakfast at Anantara Siam in Bangkok, I ran into Robert Hornman, whom I knew from Worldhotels. He looked right through me and when I told him who I was, he said, “Where are your glasses? That was your trademark.”
Identity and privacy are the two hot button topics these days. Our identity is wrapped up in our data, that which we share freely with companies today in exchange for connectivity and convenience, and of course our identity exists in our own heads as to who we are. We naively trust that those we share our identity and data with will use it carefully and judiciously, but clearly that’s proven not to be the case with the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica debacle which will now become the monster child of this issue.
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