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Without spending 8-12+ hours a day staring at a screen, I probably wouldn’t have needed glasses.
Far as we know currently, looking/staring at screens does not cause permanent damage to your vision.
Screen time is no worse than book time or sewing time or Wolfenstein time.
Concentrating reduces your blink rate. Reduced blinking dries out your eyes. That’s the main detrimental effects.
There’s evidence piling up that there is an inverse correlation between outdoor time in childhood and nearsightedness. It’s believed that the brightness of sunlight helps stimulate eye growth in a spherical shape, whereas children who don’t get a lot of sunlight are more likely to have eyes grow in a non-spherical shape with greater distance between the lens and the retina.
You can search the scientific literature for myopia and childhood sun exposure for a large number of studies on the topic.
Does screen time correlate with myopia? Maybe, but through the confounding variable that both stats tend to be inversely correlated with sunlight exposure.
Along similar lines, I think about this for any post apocalyptic scenario that disrupts supply lines. Even if things are okay in terms of food, I regularly take medication that one would presume would be hard to get without modern society. In that situation, if I broke or even scratched my glasses, it seems very unlikely I would find functional replacements. I’m not physically disabled, but I am very limited, so in any real conflict I would lose. Quickly.
In prehistory or any future environment like that, I wouldn’t last long.
In most of prehistory (and still some parts of the world today), you’d have a tribe/society that would choose to help you and look after you… Fuck, even herds of bovines do this to some extent… It’s kind of shit that we’re letting the rich stop that from happening.
Yep we have evidence in the paleolithic of individuals without teeth living for several years after they lost them. That means their community was chewing their food for them. Which is crazy to think about.
Not to mention there is also evidence of severely disabled people, typically from injuries, surviving full lives. These individuals mobility would have been very limited, but people jus took care of them. Because that’s what you did.
Infections were a big killer before antibiotics. We have vaccination these days because of the horrible things that used to happen without them. Just having clean warm water and soap readily available was a luxury back then.
And yet some missininformed people think vaccines are evil.
The reason for widespread short-sightedness is unknown but the best study I read showed that kids playing indoor sports have significantly worse vision compared to the same outdoor sports.
My theory is because we look up close frequently, our eyes become adjusted to it. As a very near sighted person I can tell you, I see much better very close (a few inches from my eyes) than someone with 20/20, like magnification. Try it. I also used a screen probably 8 hours a day even since early childhood (lol, 90s parents).
We are really well adapted for pre-history and there’s evidence we were happier and healthier back then (murder/rape was common, though). “Sapiens” covers this fantastically in general.
That magnification effect is why I don’t want lasik, it’s like my little superpower.
Plus the whole eyeball surgery thing.
It’s the smell of burning eyeball for me.
