i wanted to paint my garden shed red, but my elderly asian neighbour said that it would hurt her eyes. so i painted it purple and yellow. i would die without co

i wanted to paint my garden shed red, but my elderly asian neighbour said that it would hurt her eyes. so i painted it purple and yellow. i would die without colour in my life. it is the one thing i miss most from back when i was younger. it is slightly better in california but it was positively depressing when i was living in new england. i think they have colour in their lives only once a year..during fall. the best colours come from nature. flowers, sunsets, birds are disappearing from our lives too. where are our green spaces in cities? why is our food drab and brown? i work with a tomato breeder and the one thing i learnt is that we still eat with our eyes. people pay more for colourful food. being attracted to colour is hardwired in most species. it is a mating and survival cue for most species. if we dont know how to recognise colour and categorise them, we couldnt have evolved to where we are now in our timeline. the wrong mushroom or berry would have killed the entire tribe drying up their gene pool. that we are ok with a lack of colour in our lives indicates that our flight/fight instincts are lax...our lives are safer, predictable, comfortable and less fraught with danger. my nervous system is primed for flight/fight. i feel ill at ease when there is no colour around me and i still perceive that as something to navigate with caution. i am always recording colours or details around me...a little recording whirring machine at the back of my mind is noting down everything in my environment to make me feel safer. it's silence and lack of colour that throws me off. eta: re: the original article... i think sensors and cameras and spectrascopes and all the other wonderful things tech has given us dont need colours. we can measure light and heat in other innumerable ways to harvest required data. a robot's eyes do not need to see like we do...as we automate most functions, colour can become unnecessary. practical example: we used to evaluate ripeness of produce with colour ...now we use a brix refractometer. why try to figure if tomatoes are picked ripe when you can save money and time by picking them unripe and ripen with ethylene gas...easily monitored for over ripening with floor ethylene detectors in large warehouses filled with crates of produce from floor to ceiling. we dont need colour because technology knows how to utilise all the data in the entire spectrum. colour is just a sliver of it.