Why so many people need glasses now

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I was really near sighted in my early 20s so last year I got laser eye surgery and honestly sometimes I still get emotional about it. My vision ended up even better than 20/20 and I honestly wasn’t prepared for how good it would be. The day after my surgery I woke up and looked out the window and saw the leaves fluttering around on a tree that was blocks away and I just cried. Good vision is such a precious thing.

“Homework causes health problems” is the phrase every school kid wants to hear LOL

I wore glasses from the time I was 9 to 24. I'll NEVER forget coming out of that surgery and immediately I could see everything around me with crystal clear clarity

As someone who developed myopia at 6 years old and now, at 23 years old, my myopia is -11 and -9.5, this video is both interesting and terrifying.

Australian optometrist here. Mark Bullimore is a big dog in the field, so you definitely found the right guy to interview. Very well explained and of course some simplifications but much less errors/myths than other videos on the subject.

Wait, this suddenly makes the old stereotype that nerds or otherwise smart/bookish people wear glasses make sense. Someone who spent all their time reading and studying as a kid would be more prone to myopia and thus need glasses, and that's why people circa the 1950's started associating glasses-wearing with things like book-smarts and introversion, i.e. "nerd" traits.

As someone who’s dealt with myopia my entire life (currently -8.5), I can’t imagine not being nearsighted and am so jealous of people with normal or almost normal vision (prescriptions between -3 to +3).

I'm 42 years old and have always spent most of my time indoors with tv and video games and my vision is still at least 20/20. Both of my parents started wearing glasses when they were younger than I am now. I consider myself extremely lucky at this point as nearly everyone I know who is my age and older needs their vision corrected somehow.

I would've spent more time outdoors as a kid if my parents weren't so overprotective in my childhood

Vox never ceases to amaze me as to how they can cram in useful and important information in such a short little video .

I'm high myopic (-7.00/-7.50) and I spent a good deal of time outdoors as a child. And it doesn't seem to come down to my genetics as no one else in my family has such a significant need for vision correction. I used to work as an optician and I have to say that a policy is in place in most commercial optical shops to put glasses on every face that walks in the door. I think that in the past some people with moderate myopia were simply unaware of how bad their vision actually was but the prevalence of big optical chains and cheaper glasses has skewed the numbers a little. Off topic, but anyone interested should look into the mark-up that optical shops place on materials. Those $300 glasses on your face probably cost around $20 wholesale, often less than that. And those coatings and "UV filters" added are pennies if they even exist at all.

(19y) I spent the entire covid period and this winter indoors mostly at the computer, I developed weak myopia, but by spending more hours outside, especially at vantage points where you can look into the distance, my vision improved so much that it is almost unrecognizable from a healthy eye . if it is caught in the beginning, it can probably be corrected by changing the lifestyle.

Kudos for not trying to blame it all on recreational screen-time. The parents I know who fret about screen-time… the sedentary aspects, the indoor aspects…. I’ve never heard them complain about kids sitting at school, reading books indoors, playing board games indoors, etc.

I spent 75% of my childhood outdoors, and my vision was 20/20. In high school I started spending more time indoors, doing my homework/studying on a laptop. Within 2 years of being in high school, I needed glasses.

That’s interesting since my eye sight really got worse when I moved to a colder climate and didn’t have neighborhood kids to play with like I did when I was in elementary school. I was stuck inside more, and I was attached to technology more than I had been as a kid. Makes total sense now that I have glasses

In a recent conversation with my optician, we discussed how it was interested that both of my daughters are also far-sighted like I am, but neither of my sons are. We were given advice similar to this on how to help them not develop myopia: hour+ outside a day, limit 'close work' in the evening and how close they put any books or devices.

Optometrist here. Loved how this was packaged and presented! Thanks for bringing exposure to this.

Some of us are “doomed” from the start. I basically lived outside during my childhood and still ride my bicycle to and from work throughout the year. I was diagnosed with myopia as a child and currently sport glasses just shy of -8 for each eye as a 50+ year old. 😢 And great video!

This video was very eye-opening and put into perspective and added the science behind a trend that we have seen as a society. We are seeing more and more people wearing glasses or complaining that their eyesight is getting worse as time is passing. What was usually an issue of getting old is now seen in the younger population where you can go up to undergrad students and a lot of them would talk about how their eyesight is getting worse. I like how this video first explains the science behind this trend by explaining that more and more people are experiencing myopia, in which people are having a smaller range of distance of what they can see in front of them. The video concludes that myopia rates are getting higher because we are spending more time doing a task that requires our eyesight to be focused on something too close for an extended amount of time. This can be seen with students who use a computer or book to study for school. Another reason that it was thought to be behind the rise of myopia rates was that we are spending less time outdoors which increases the probability of developing myopia in the future. In the video it was highlighted that some countries like Asia have very high rates of myopia especially the kid population which was attributed to Asia’s emphasis on education and minimize emphasis on being outdoors. When this was mentioned, it made me think about the ethical point of children's autonomy and if it was being respected and thought about in this case. Just because it thought that education should be of the highest importance in a child’s life it is not ethically correct to put that above the health of a child. Just because the children do not have full autonomy there should be a clear understanding of the importance to have the kid's best interest at hand this means seeing children as a whole person that needs to have a good balance between education and just being a child with time for playing around. Another ethical point that this video made me think about is how the healthcare system was helping with this trend of increased myopia especially in underserved populations as getting eyecare and even more so getting glasses can be a financial burden that underserved populations might not have the resources to deal with. It might come down to getting glasses or being able to afford that month's rent. If myopia is becoming a bigger issue the healthcare system needs to find and support more action to help bridge the gap between eyecare in underserved communities.