A bit of a philosophical, zoomed out, weird one for you today …
The Big Picture (The Small Picture?)
One of the things I noticed over the past two decades of being into eyeballs and vision and seeing things, took me a while to formulate
There is a myopic lifestyle. A myopic way of functioning. A compensated sort of smaller bubble to exist in.
It’s the hardest thing to fix if you’re trying to fix your eyesight. It’s a bit like that “fish in the water” metaphor, you don’t know about water, you don’t see the water, because the water is all around and has always been. It’s normal to you so it’s difficult to observe from an outside perspective.
An example: When I started to need glasses in my teens, I slowly became more withdrawn. I replaced more social and group activity and sport, with books. Reading became an increasingly large part of my life, when wearing glasses added a background bit of a perceived handicap. I wasn’t about to be running around on a soccer field when the ball could come flying out of the periphery, where I wouldn’t see it, hit my glasses, my glasses would go flying, and then I would be stumbling around trying to find them. With all the kids finding that very funny.
That happens to you once, you stop playing soccer. At least if you’re not that cool to begin with, like darling Jake.
Extrapolate out of this what you will. Add to that the giant factor of now screens being indefinitely more tempting than books. It’s crack compared to finding the temptation of old-school reading. It makes it hugely more likely to get into this myopic bubble lifestyle of living in the near, in the right-in-front-of-you, in the space that is safe, because you can see.
I’ve come to the conclusion that while there are lots of factors, there must also be the part of your subconscious which is designed to protect the meat-box, to be saying “nope, this whole distance thing, not for you”.
What you think is you, and your personal preferences, and your fish-in-water life, is in fact a reduced scope existence.
Hey, maybe that’s not you at all. Let’s scale it back and say it was me, and it’s a lot of people I’ve met over the years and talked to over the years, whose biggest obstacle to improving eyesight is increasing the scope of life.
I run into the question a lot … what do I do instead of the screen, or the book?
Or I don’t even run into the question, but I have to pry it out of people, the fact that they do nothing that doesn’t involve screens. Nobody wants to admit it, especially if that’s what’s going on.
Remove the job and the errands and the things life requires to keep it running. Imagine being interviewed by the 9 year old and the 14 year old version of you, them asking what you do for fun and entertainment.
And yes again maybe that’s not you. Maybe you ride off-road motorcycles and go sky diving and fly model air planes and play guitar and go rock climbing on the weekend. In that case, you won’t have much trouble reducing your diopter. In that case all you need to do is follow the standard endmyopia protocol and it will work. Like clockwork.
But the closer you are to my myopic lifestyle case, the more reducing diopters can be a struggle.
Because you set yourself up to live in close-up. So making your eyes work for distance vision goes counter what you actually do and want to do with your eyes.
Fixing that is the most fun part. It’s also the part that takes the most patience, and is the hardest to visualize, imagine, put into the context of who you think you are and what you think you like to do.
Maybe you never thought of riding a horse. Maybe the idea of weekend hikes and camping are entirely alien and you’re thinking, that’s far from power outlets, toilets, and a comfortable bed (you and me both, in that case). It’s no small feat to be able to rationally observe your current lifestyle, determining whether it’s myopic, and then having the large scale of imagination to be able to say “hey let’s try things outside of this comfort zone”.
Trying new things not as a burst of a quick exploration, but rather slowly and methodically, revisiting regularly, having a pile of browser tabs open exploring what random people do out there.
I found everything from tiny airports that only have experimental aircraft, weekly sailboat races, and countless other wild and random things over the years.
Get that and fixing your eyes will be a piece of cake.
And again this partially feels like a huge, massive assumption. Or judgment. Which it’s not meant to be at all. If you read this and you think wow Jake you’re really reaching here just stick to the diopters, I get it, totally. This is just my own, little brain observation of some things that appear to be happening.
Cheers,
-Jake
