What Do You Use Your Eyes For?

Above: Monk in Cambodia. I’d pulled over for shelter from the rain, and there he was.

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You ever notice how none of your friends or family really cares, when you tell them that myopia is reversible?

Does it make you a bit crazy that nobody shares your enthusiasm?

If so, this is for you. Otherwise, it’s entirely tl:dr (too long didn’t read). I’ll shed some light on some ways of thinking, as well as what does potentially serve as motivation. Because yes, myopia reversal in itself isn’t really a huge conversation starter.

The real motivation, the reason why you might enjoy better eyesight, is the question to investigate. And I’ll tell you why, which is especially important if you’re a casual reader and not really sold on doing anything about your glasses.

Let’s start with an unrelated story.

Like most men, I don’t really care so very incredibly much about intangibles of health. I think, meh, it’ll fix itself. I eat reasonably well. I exercise. It’ll be fine, I say. It’s of course not a black and white gender thing, but I see this reflected often enough in my students attitudes about eyes. ;-)

I’ve torn my rotator cuffs (too clumsy to be doing the sort of adrenaline inducing stuff I’d get into) to a point where various doctors agreed surgery would be required. It wasn’t. Exercise fixed the problem just fine. See? I still have some cracked vertebrae, and if I sit in front of a computer in the wrong sort of position, I’ll end up with a three day migraine. Not though if I don’t sit like that, and much lesser chance if I’ve been working out regularly. So I leave it be, close enough.

What we need, is a tangible, definitive reason to do something, about a tangible, definitive issue.

A couple of years ago I started doing comprehensive blood tests. Getting older, starting to think about taking care of health. I discovered that my thyroid function was seriously compromised. No symptoms, no problems, but the numbers were really very far off from what would be considered good and healthy. I started reading a bit about the topic and found that if I ignored the problem, I might loose my thyroid altogether. And then reading about the consequences of that, spurred me into taking action. So much of imagining to be invincible, as we tend to do in your youth.

It ended up being a lot like the myopia journey (though fortunately there is a whole lot more good, actionable information out there on Hashimotos, than myopia). Research, get past the doctors peddling synthetic drugs that I’d have to take forever. Get past the hippies and their banana diets. Finding ways to troubleshoot, quantify, actually solve the problem.

And I did, eventually.

One of the pieces of the puzzle was gluten. Ironic since I always used to shake my head at all the Californian Prius driving Yoga moms and their imagined gluten insensitivities.

Gluten was far from the only issue, but I definitely can’t have any of it, lest I want the TSH blood numbers go completely off the chart. So I definitely don’t eat anything with gluten.

Tangible data. Tangible action, and tangible consequences if ignored.

For eyesight for me the tangible moment was being told that I needed -5.00 glasses. That might mean nothing to you, but something about five, five diopters just put me over the edge. I looked at my -4 glasses, which weren’t exactly thin, and I just couldn’t stand the thought. It was just one prescription too far.

That one isn’t an ideal one as recommendation, “just wait till the number freaks you out completely”. I wondered what would motivate people, when I started improving my own eyesight, and found myself stupefied that nobody else seemed to care about this huge revelation.

You know what it is? The prescriptions work. Your friends, they can see with the glasses. Problem solved. Life’s busy. There’s no tangible incentive to think about it. And then there’s the fear of the unknown, there’s weariness that you, their friend maybe lost your mind a bit. There’s the thought of doing any work, or exercises (how much do people love exercises?). So altogether, you’re all excited to a solution to what’s a non-problem to most people.

So I start it off in a totally different place.

I get family members asking me to help their loved ones, who happen to absolutely not care about any of this. What’s not helping is when somebody has been going on and on about diopters and centimeters and strain and health for profit, and all the things that honestly, nobody else gives a sh** about.

What do people care about?

Look at GoPro’s ads. Beautiful ocean, a beautiful wave, a beautiful person riding the wave, on a beautiful surfboard. High resolution, amazing colors, a bit of slow motion.

That, is seeing.

If I give you perfect eyesight today, what will you do with it? That’s the sticky one. Most people say, meh, glasses, contact lenses, close enough. And sure, if you only use your eyes to navigate traffic to the office, to see the computer screen and the bosses e-mails. The way back home, and then to see the TV screen. Definitely, fixing anything there isn’t a huge incentive.

I’ve taken students on hot air balloon rides, stand-up racing Jetski instructions in the Florida keys, amazing winter indoor pools in Germany (Germans and their pools, seriously), skiing in various interesting places. Seeing things, and realizing how much lenses stop you from fully being in the experience at the same time.

My turn for hang gliding lessons. (and yes my face, actually green in that shot)

That’s where it’s at. Glasses suck, when there’s water involved. Or wind. So do contact lenses. Wouldn’t it be nice, to do all this without lenses?

My own vision improvement journey has turned me into even more of a vagabonding hippie than I used to be. I’ve spent so much time living on the tiniest budgets, to prove to others that enjoying life isn’t about having millions in the bank, that I actually start truly enjoying simple life.

You know you can comfortable live on the beach in Vietnam, in a three-bedroom house in a nice resort town, literally a five minute walk from the ocean, for about 400 USD per month? That includes rent, a motorbike, utilities, eating seafood and other fresh goodies at restaurants three times a day, it includes two or three coffee shop excursions per day, and even includes paying for friends lunches and drinks. I’m not saying you should do that, but I have to show friends this often enough just to stop their excuses that it’s just because, “oh you can afford that stuff, Jake”. Yea, 400 bucks. Anyone can make that, teaching English to Chinese kids via Skype, ten hours a week. ;-)

Motorbike bridge in Vietnam… I wasn’t super confident about that one.

I kept years of very detailed expense reports, down to 20 cents for parking charges. I have them categorized by continent, country, season. You might be amazed at how much of the world you can enjoy at real levels of comfort, at budgets less than what you pay for utilities and insurance in some Western countries.

But I’m getting a bit far out of topic.

Eyesight. When you start to think about what you want to see with that amazing gift that is eyesight, priorities slowly tend to shift. Hey, build your eyesight goal into your next vacation plan. It’ll be a lot more fun to find your beach towel without glasses. Even going from a -10 to a -8 is going to give you a whole lot better quality of sight, and you might start really actually looking at the world, and deciding that you want to see more of it.

That’s where it’s at. No, I don’t really care about diopters and centimeters. If we’re going to be honest, I didn’t keep a log for years, and my Snellen measurement were sporadic, at best. I wanted to see things.

There are all these people trying to argue about whether vision improvement is possible, and there are a lot of people who could just care less about being stuck behind those lenses. What most of them have in common is that there is just very little in their lives worth truly looking at. If you strip out the need for eyes for navigating traffic, for work e-mails, for TV and Facebook, there might literally be almost nothing that they need eyes for. Myopia, in the literal sense, but also just shortsighted metaphorically.

That’s why I’m not well inclined to partake in arguments about the finer points of vision improvement, and axial change, and this guy saying whatever, and why I haven’t published studies (yet, that’s coming don’t worry). It is all besides the real point.

If you ever find yourself at Burning Man, or in some other random desert, dust flying everywhere, coating your glasses or scratching your contact lenses, you’ll know what I am here for. Teaching, vs lens selling. I want you to see things. And if you want to see things too, then you’ll see exactly what makes my method worthwhile.