The topic closest to your favorite guru’s tiny little black heart, kid’s eyesight (and how to keep it working properly).

Adults, I could sort of take it or leave it.  Plenty of people are their own worst enemies, and we’re well capable of making our own choices, doing our own research, being responsible for our indulgences.

Kids though, they don’t know any better.

So when a small child is being given a phone or iPad as babysitter, an otherwise magnanimous beard isn’t very happy.

And we go from not very happy to directly pissed off, when some dime store retail optometrist lets unsuspecting visitors to his mall retail store believe that he’s some sort of medical doctor (he absolutely isn’t).  He’ll call his retail lens sales ‘prescriptions’ (they’re just clear curved pieces of plastic), his customers ‘patients’ (no you aren’t sick, and a shopping mall isn’t a hospital), and worst of all – sells parents glasses for their little kids.

F*ck those guys.  It’s where I draw the line.

Yes of course, there is far worse in the world, and plenty of the same level of bad.  Anybody associated with Kraft Foods for example, or just industrial food in general, or most of what big pharma gets up to, or pick any politician or divorce lawyer or the American for-profit prison system, or whatever militaries get up to.

I know, kittehz.  Glasses are a minor infraction in the scheme of things.  Perhaps in the spirit of the lesser evil, I picked optometry to be the thing to rail against, educate about, and help you escape from.  All those other evils that’s for somebody else, let Elon build the space ships.

Anyway, excuses for rants aside, here’s a quick clip from our recent live chat Q&A, talking about kid’s close-up time:

And again, I’ve said plenty about child eyesight.

You might also get creative searching our wiki for child myopia topics.

Here’s the thing.  As a parent, you’re the one who is likely set  examples the little ones are going to remember for the rest of their lives.  And we live in incredibly strange and unprecedented times.  How do you keep your kids from turning into TikTok zombies, when all their friends are already?  Are you going to have to go full-native and escape all of default culture, risk them not getting socialized properly around their peers?  Do you just go, well it’ll be fine, I have to go work now.

I don’t know either.  My prior answer was to build an off-grid house in the jungle and at least delay all those questions for a good while.  That didn’t work out either, so I’m not the one with the answer.

So I just offer the little picture:  Phones are not good toys.  If you have little ones, maybe this is a good time and reason to address your own phone addiction, so at least they don’t see their role models scrolling like a zombie.  Just like you’re not getting drunk in front of them or chain smoking cigarettes, show them that there’s plenty more to life than letting billion dollar companies get your soul in exchange for mindless entertainment.

God Jake again with the rants, you’re thinking.

I know.  But this is the fuel that provides the motivation to continue to also offer tools.  

Go make some 20/20 gains.

– Jake