20 years ago I was injured in one eye. Without an operation it would have left me going slowly blind. The operation was invented maybe 20 years earlier.
Both my eyes had a cataract at a quite early age. Artificial lenses where invented AFAIK 50 years ago. The new lenses even correct my shortsightedness and astigmatism!
So if I had lived only 50 years earlier I would be blind on one eye and quite possibly without a lense or at least seeing really foggy on the other. Now I am sitting here with - 0.5/-1 and otherwise great eye sight.
There are no words how grateful I am for the wonders of modern eye medicine.
I'm so glad you have your vision!
The first successful organ transplant was in 1954.
Transplants weren't often super successful until the development of Cyclosporine in 1982.
Similar thing happened to my dad. He was slowly going blind from cataracts, like he couldn't even make out the dinner table in front of him. He just wasn't mentioning it until it became untenable.
Then we found out there's a free surgery to fix it, and now suddenly he's got clear 20/20 vision at almost 80! He's got better vision than I do lol
I think similarly whenever my airways casually close up.
Waking up when the weather changes:
You're nostrils do that as you sleep to keep the one closest to the bed/ground closed. Since people roll from side to side over the course of a night your nostrils swap which one's closed
Everyone’s talking blocked sinuses but I took your comment to mean asthma.
While every other cave person is running down a mammoth my asthmatic ass would be dying because of pollen or dust.
I apparently threw my glasses across the room in my sleep last night. Spent a solid 5 minutes going full on Velma mode looking for them.
Do you wear your glasses in bed??
Sleepwalking is correlated with stress levels. I've sleepwalked a few times in my life; some I half-remember, but most not at all, I only know if I find out from someone else like family/friends/partners.
When I was a teenager, I had a wall scroll that hung above the head of my bed. One morning, I found it piled on the floor next to my bed. It could have been one of my family, but they all denied it and there's no motivation anyway. I had to conclude that I did it in my sleep, but it's stuck with me because I've always found it extremely disturbing that I'm up and about while I'm completely (or nearly completely) unconscious. I've lived in a few skyscrapers with windows and balcony doors that opened more than enough for me to jump, and the idea that I'll wake up halfway down scares the everfucking bejeezus out of me.
Ha, thats why I keep an old pair in the nightstand.
u can use your phone's cam
I make use of that trick a lot, unfortunately it wasn't a ton of help this time.
Natural selection hasn't really applied to humans for thousands of years. We beat nature when we created civilizations. Which is partly why some of these less than ideal genetic traits go unchecked now in the population.
It doesn't have to do with civilisation, but with group compassion. In fact, civilizations tend to care less if somebody starves to death on the streets because their eyes are not performing well enough to earn money...
That's really not true at all though. Look up "Food Pantries in my area" and see how many places offer food in your area. The blind man would qualify for lifetime disability checks. Food stamps are a thing, charities and churches do this kind of work as well. My city has an emergency rent program and there are, of course, homeless shelters and soup kitchens as well. It's really that society's mechanism for meeting the needs of the hungry are part voluntary (charity) and part automatic with entitlements (not a bad word!) and sometimes people fall through the cracks.
This is why getting people connected to resources is such a big deal.
I can't imagine having to live with my natural sight 24/7.
I definitely would not be driving. Probably not walking much either, might not see the bus coming.
If you had lived at an earlier point, there's a good chance your eyesight would have been better. Not just because of natural selection for genes or whatever. The modern spread of nearsightedness is primarily attributed to greater time spent indoors, looking at things close to you like books, and particularly during childhood. It is largely nurture instead of nature.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20220927-can-you-prevent-short-sightedness-in-kids
Remember, your only job as far as natural selection is concerned is to have offspring and have them survive long enough to repeat the cycle. Old people with bad eyesight just have to be able to keep the kids and grandkids alive.
Bad eyesight could have a positive effect on generating offspring because you can't tell how ugly your partner is. Or that about 30% of the time you aren't having sex with your partner but someone else with poor eyesight instead.
You'd be having sex with a sneaky fucker
Don't even need to be old. Don't need to be able to see that good to know the red blotch that smells like the good berries is probably the good berries, and the antelopeish splotch might be a good thing to poke with your pointy stick of choice.
you know whats even weirder? Some dude somewhere realized that lenses were a thing, and realized that your eyes were also just a glorified lense. And that theoretically you could just put a lense over a lense to fix the bad lensing of the lense. And it fucking worked.
Natural selection my ass.
Some species members care for each other. Humans obviously (some anyways), even lions I think have been known to provide food when another has broken teeth or something.
Apes feed and care for their elderly. When the old ape decides it's time, it will go off alone into the jungle to die
I don't need it to be night to realise that. I have -13 on both eyes, near-sightedness (not sure about the correct terminology in English). I see clearly for about one centimetre right by the tip of my nose, everything closer or further than that is a blurry and fuzzy mess. To use my phone without glasses I have to press it against my nose and can only see about half of the screen width clearly.
I think they just meant night time is when people remove glasses, so that's when you notice the difference 😎
Are you one of those tiny old ladies with the 2 inch thick glasses that cover half their face?
Oof I'm circa -10/-11 and that's rough enough. I'd say an inch vision not a centimeter for me.
I remember maybe a decade or more ago some enterprising gent made a glasses design with some kind of resin in the lens, so the wearer could adjust the lens thickness to fit their needs. Nobody would back his invention so he created a non-profit to fund these glasses for the developing world. I'd love to know what happened to it because its still something I care about supporting.
Wow, that is a very cool concept. I, too, would like to back this.
That and a bunch of reasons
but mostly the bunch of reasons
Yeah, I always get a warning message from zenni when I order glasses. It thinks my script is wrong cause it's such a weird one.
I know I'm half blind! Don't make me feel bad about it too!
As someone with bad sight, all my other senses are tingling. So, while blind people might've been unable to hunt, they would have made great night guards, which is a boon for social groups wary of nocturnal predators.
My eyesight went to shit from sitting at a desk and staring at a monitor all day. I wonder if my eyesight would've remained perfect well into adulthood without computers.
It wouldn't have, apparently. An optometrist friend says that sort of thing only makes slightly worse the things that were already going to happen to your eyes. Like, if you are nearsighted and didn't exercise your eyes looking at far away stuff enough, your eyesight will be slightly more myopic. But you were going to be nearsighted anyway. Like, people were awfully nearsighted way before the invention of the television and sedentary indoor lifestyles. We just hadn't invented optometry yet to note it.
So you're saying ADHD has saved many people's eyesight?
Not that this would be the only thing I would be selected out for...
Okay... Sheesh! Text message, email, voicemail, and now lemmy post!? Fine, I'll call to schedule my yearly appointment. Happy now, doc?
My eyesight is atrocious. One time I was out in a notable windstorm, I stumbled, and my glasses got ripped off my face. I would have been absolutely fuckered if I'd been alone. They'd gotten blown under a car and I never would have found them by myself.
Being seriously evaluated for Sjogren's Syndrome currently. Went to a rheumatologist for joint pain and found out that my chronic eye pain and dry eyes is a big indicator of a problem. I thought it is because my eyesight is shit and I look at screens constantly
Do you have recurrent corneal erosions?
Not yet. But my eyes are definitely getting worse in regards to the dryness and pain. I thought it was just eye strain, but the doctor was like, "no. There's definitely something wrong with you."
I have loads of symptoms that indicate auto-immune disease. My thyroid is also larger than it should be, which has the doctor concerned. She could physically feel how big it is.
Just make the world think they are blind too. Just like anything else.
Every time I have a migraine (or when I take my daily preventative. or whenever I notice the anti-migraine coating on my glasses) I consider how long it'll take someone to put me out of my misery once the apocalypse shows up. Can't say I'll be super useful whenever I'm forced to be in a dark/quiet room for a day or so before I can function again.
Would I even know how blind I am if glasses didn't exist?
Pretty funny! But the reason so many people need glasses is because we spend all our time indoors, reading. People in the past were outside working all the time and they didn’t need glasses as a result.
I was born with bad eyes. People back then also were born with bad eyes but couldn't do anything about it.
Obviously you can also get bad eyes (shortsighted) when always only focusing on short distances but it's not the only way. Most people also become far sighted when they get older (the pressure inside your eye lowers and therefore your eye becomes shorter)
Focusing close regularly doesn't make you short sighted, not getting enough tourquoise light on your retina from staying inside makes your eye keep getting longer instead of stopping when the focal point is correct. Well, that and genetics.
And losing the ability to see near as you age has nothong to do with pressure. Your lens is constantly adding new layers to itself to stay clear, and after 40 it's become so thick the muscles that pull it to accommodate near vision can't stretch it enough. By 58 it doesn't stretch at all any more. That's why everyone eventually needs bifocals/progressives.
Don't state things as fact if your not sure of them.
Source: ABOA, NCLE, OD, I own two optical practices.
Is that true? I feel like it simply wasn't an option, so people didn't get them.
My understanding is that being nearsighted is a relatively new phenomenon that is largely due to being indoors a lot. Farsightedness in old age has been around since humans have been humans.
I took a quick look and Wikipedia partially bears this out re: nearsightedness.
I think its a bit of both.
Personally, I apparently focus (that's what it's called, right? Non native speaker here) slightly behind infinity, so I'll have to put a slight amount of effort into seeing clouds clearly. I can also focus on close objects, but if I read a book for about 5-60 minutes without my glasses I'll suffer a splitting headache, depending on how much time I've used inside recently.
I've found that I can do office work just fine using glasses, but after a few months I'll need to get stronger glasses as my eyes become worse. This resets if I spend a few days outside avoiding computers, books, and my glasses entirely.
I can usually watch TV just fine without glasses, but if I've been doing office work or just been mostly inside for about 2-3 months I'll need my computer glasses (tuned to focus at around 50-100cm) to watch the TV (located about 3 meters away). At this point, I usually also have to use my reading glasses for the computer, and I've got a special pair of glasses that I can use for reading in that specific case. I even start having problems driving longer routes.
In other words, I have
reallyrather (I can still most tasks, just with a headache) bad eyesight during winter and spring, but usually have much better eyesight and barely need glasses during summer and fall.There are a few ways to have bad eyesight
- Short sighted, can only focus close up
- Long sighted, cannot focus close up
- Poor acuity, cannot see the detail others can see
- Colour blindness
It looks like most of the short sightedness is caused by lifestyle since it is much more prevalent in places where children spend a lot of time indoors
The others would have affected our ancestors as much as us
There is some truth to it, but there's also just the fact that some people's eyes are bad enough that they need glasses to fully function in modern society, but not so bad that they couldn't survive in the wild without them.
Me for example. I need glasses to drive, I can't read street signs otherwise, and I need them at work, but I otherwise usually don't wear them. The only thing better eyesight would meaningfully help me with in the wild is navigation and spotting hidden animals quicker, and even then it'd really only help with snakes. Any other ambush predator I'd be likely to encounter in my region is big enough that spotting it a few seconds sooner wouldn't really help.
OP is right, nearsightedness has been attributed to "not being outside enough" while your eyes still develop (aside from genetics of course), something to do with not getting bright enough sunlight for multiple hours as you are supposed to.
You would not have ruined your eyes in the first place back then because no evil tablets and other artificial garbage bad for the eyes
My eyes were shot long before tablets were ever a thing
Yeah I'm in my 40s now and could barely see aged 5. I had glasses that were so thick even getting them in high index the lens sticks out of a chunky frame.
I have an astigmatism in both my eyes.
We have discovered nearsightedness is caused by a lack of sunshine during childhood. The amount of bright light you're exposed to determines when your eyeballs stop growing/adjusting and if you don't get enough you end up near-sighted.
That's a factor sometimes, but plenty of people are just genetically nearsighted.
... Bad eyesight has existed for all of human history. It's far from a new thing.
No..
