go get your eyes checked

20 years ago I was injured in one eye. Without an operation it would have left me going slowly blind. The operation was invented maybe 20 years earlier.

Both my eyes had a cataract at a quite early age. Artificial lenses where invented AFAIK 50 years ago. The new lenses even correct my shortsightedness and astigmatism!

So if I had lived only 50 years earlier I would be blind on one eye and quite possibly without a lense or at least seeing really foggy on the other. Now I am sitting here with - 0.5/-1 and otherwise great eye sight.

There are no words how grateful I am for the wonders of modern eye medicine.

Similar thing happened to my dad. He was slowly going blind from cataracts, like he couldn't even make out the dinner table in front of him. He just wasn't mentioning it until it became untenable.
Then we found out there's a free surgery to fix it, and now suddenly he's got clear 20/20 vision at almost 80! He's got better vision than I do lol

I think similarly whenever my airways casually close up.

Waking up when the weather changes:
- You're nostrils do that as you sleep to keep the one closest to the bed/ground closed. Since people roll from side to side over the course of a night your nostrils swap which one's closed
Everyone’s talking blocked sinuses but took your comment to mean asthma.
While every other cave person is running down a mammoth my asthmatic ass would be dying because of pollen or dust.
- I assumed sleep apnea. CPAP users of today are the past’s “dang he died mysteriously in his sleep, oh well!”
- Personally, I tend to use my mouth to inhale other things.

I apparently threw my glasses across the room in my sleep last night. Spent a solid 5 minutes going full on Velma mode looking for them.

Do you wear your glasses in bed??
- No, I frankly don't have the slightest clue how I did it.

I can't imagine having to live with my natural sight 24/7.

I definitely would not be driving. Probably not walking much either, might not see the bus coming.

- I was more imagining the current world, but corrective lenses were never invented.

you know whats even weirder? Some dude somewhere realized that lenses were a thing, and realized that your eyes were also just a glorified lense. And that theoretically you could just put a lense over a lense to fix the bad lensing of the lense. And it fucking worked.

Natural selection my ass.

Legend has it that it started with an old drunk man that decided to hold beer bottles to his eyes.

Remember, your only job as far as natural selection is concerned is to have offspring and have them survive long enough to repeat the cycle. Old people with bad eyesight just have to be able to keep the kids and grandkids alive.

Bad eyesight could have a positive effect on generating offspring because you can't tell how ugly your partner is. Or that about 30% of the time you aren't having sex with your partner but someone else with poor eyesight instead.

I like to tell my Republican father we'd both be classified legally blind and on the welfare he hates so much if optometry wasn't around. Helps put it in perspective for him how some people just "lose" the life lotto and need help to live in the same world as able-bodied folks.

Natural selection hasn't really applied to humans for thousands of years. We beat nature when we created civilizations. Which is partly why some of these less than ideal genetic traits go unchecked now in the population.

Evolution and natural selection never stops, we've only changed what the selective pressures are.
- True. I was thinking of the selective pressures of nature, but there are absolutely still self imposed selective forces acting on our species.

I remember maybe a decade or more ago some enterprising gent made a glasses design with some kind of resin in the lens, so the wearer could adjust the lens thickness to fit their needs. Nobody would back his invention so he created a non-profit to fund these glasses for the developing world. I'd love to know what happened to it because its still something I care about supporting.

As someone with bad sight, all my other senses are tingling. So, while blind people might've been unable to hunt, they would have made great night guards, which is a boon for social groups wary of nocturnal predators.

My eyesight went to shit from sitting at a desk and staring at a monitor all day. I wonder if my eyesight would've remained perfect well into adulthood without computers.

It wouldn't have, apparently. An optometrist friend says that sort of thing only makes slightly worse the things that were already going to happen to your eyes. Like, if you are nearsighted and didn't exercise your eyes looking at far away stuff enough, your eyesight will be slightly more myopic. But you were going to be nearsighted anyway. Like, people were awfully nearsighted way before the invention of the television and sedentary indoor lifestyles. We just hadn't invented optometry yet to note it.

That and a bunch of reasons

but mostly the bunch of reasons

God made you that way, and she doesn’t make mistakes. Think about it.

He seems to have left a test foreskin on the deployment build.
God doesn't exist.

Some species members care for each other. Humans obviously (some anyways), even lions I think have been known to provide food when another has broken teeth or something.

Every time I have a migraine (or when I take my daily preventative) I consider how long it'll take someone to put me out of my misery once the apocalypse shows up. Can't say I'll be super useful whenever I'm forced to be in a dark/quiet room for a day or so before I can function again.

Pretty funny! But the reason so many people need glasses is because we spend all our time indoors, reading. People in the past were outside working all the time and they didn’t need glasses as a result.

Is that true? I feel like it simply wasn't an option, so people didn't get them.
- I think its a bit of both.
  Personally, I apparently focus (that's what it's called, right? Non native speaker here) slightly behind infinity, so I'll have to put a slight amount of effort into seeing clouds clearly. I can also focus on close objects, but if I read a book for about 5-60 minutes without my glasses I'll suffer a splitting headache, depending on how much time I've used inside recently.
  I've found that I can do office work just fine using glasses, but after a few months I'll need to get stronger glasses as my eyes become worse. This resets if I spend a few days outside avoiding computers, books, and my glasses entirely.
  I can usually watch TV just fine without glasses, but if I've been doing office work or just been mostly inside for about 2-3 months I'll need my computer glasses (tuned to focus at around 50-100cm) to watch the TV (located about 3 meters away). At this point, I usually also have to use my reading glasses for the computer, and I've got a special pair of glasses that I can use for reading in that specific case. I even start having problems driving longer routes.
  In other words, I have really bad eyesight during winter and spring, but usually have much better eyesight and barely need glasses during summer and fall.
- My understanding is that being nearsighted is a relatively new phenomenon that is largely due to being indoors a lot. Farsightedness in old age has been around since humans have been humans.
  I took a quick look and Wikipedia partially bears this out re: nearsightedness.
I was born with bad eyes. People back then also were born with bad eyes but couldn't do anything about it.
Obviously you can also get bad eyes (shortsighted) when always only focusing on short distances but it's not the only way. Most people also become far sighted when they get older (the pressure inside your eye lowers and therefore your eye becomes shorter)
- Focusing close regularly doesn't make you short sighted, not getting enough tourquoise light on your retina from staying inside makes your eye keep getting longer instead of stopping when the focal point is correct. Well, that and genetics.
  And losing the ability to see near as you age has nothong to do with pressure. Your lens is constantly adding new layers to itself to stay clear, and after 40 it's become so thick the muscles that pull it to accommodate near vision can't stretch it enough. By 58 it doesn't stretch at all any more. That's why everyone eventually needs bifocals/progressives.
  Don't state things as fact if your not sure of them.
  Source: ABOA, NCLE, OD, I own two optical practices.

You would not have ruined your eyes in the first place back then because no evil tablets and other artificial garbage bad for the eyes

... Bad eyesight has existed for all of human history. It's far from a new thing.

No..