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Comment by phonebucket | Hacker News Reader

I'm short-sighted. I'm more worried about blurry traffic than blurry food.

My understanding of the parent's post was that someone with -2 vision may expect roughly perfect vision as their eyes age.

I couldn't find a study with data, but there are anecdotal guides online (for picking reading glasses) which state that by 60 years old, it's estimated that a person would need about +2.25 diopters in correction. So someone who is around -2 diopters may expect to have roughly perfect vision as they get older.

This is a misunderstanding of what happens to your eyes as you age. Your eyes lose the ability to change focus. People with normal vision will have their focus stuck near infinity and will need reading glasses for close up things. People with mild myopia will have their focus stuck at close range and therefore won't need reading glasses. They will still need glasses to see clearly far away, but they always did, so it won't be a change for them.

I guess if I had to choose, I would pick needing glasses for far away rather than up close. But I wouldn't trade normal vision for myopia just to avoid needing reading glasses in old age.

My parents had corrective eye surgery in the last decade (corrected their myopia), and they claim the eye surgery damaged their "reading vision." They lament the loss of their reading vision, and I have to keep explaining that they're experiencing presbyopia and not some damage the surgery caused.

My myopia is pretty bad (-9.25 and -8.5 in contacts), so I don't even get the benefit of reading without correction.

> My parents had corrective eye surgery in the last decade (corrected their myopia), and they claim the eye surgery damaged their "reading vision."

I'm -7.00 / -7.25 and this happens to me if I wear contacts instead of glasses. With glasses I can comfortably read a book or screen from about 10 inches away and beyond. With contacts I have to hold it at arms' length before I can make out small text. This is one of the many reasons I've stuck with glasses over the years. Another advantage of glasses is that I can take them off and have a natural and detailed "magnifying" effect. This comes in handy when soldering small components (wearing non-correcting safety glasses) or examining a circuit board for tiny defects like cold solder joints or broken components.

For a disease which affects literally everyone as they age, presbyopia is astonishingly unknown. I didn't hear about it at all until I started working on VR and eye tracking.

Pretty much everyone knows their eyesight will get worse with age. It's just that most people refuse to admit they're getting older.

There's hope that this won't be an issue in the future:

https://www.reviewofoptometry.com/news/article/eye-drop-for-...

I've been following the development of this drug since before it was bought by Novartis.

I was expecting the average results to get better along with the median, but perhaps the dosage just wasn't high enough in this trial.

Very interesting! Hopefully they have more success in the future. Seems like an enormous market so hopefully there will be more investment.

It's also possible for the distance correction to change as one ages. In my case I have gone from -2 to +1.75 for distance in a span of 20 years.

Thanks for taking the time to reply and explain; I didn't understand how it works.

-2 is not that blurry. You may not be able to reliably read a license plate at distance but you'll still see the (mildly blurry) car coming at you.

It's not just about whether you can see there's an oncoming car. For example, if you can't read the road signs ahead until a few seconds later than someone with "normal" vision, your driving will be seriously affected due to lack of timely information, and the added mental burden of trying to compensate for this.

My contacts are -1.75 with -0.75x148 astigmatism and I can't make out peoples faces unless I'm practically standing next to them. Nevermind trying to read a menu board at a restaurant counter or trying to find my glasses if I misplace them. Driving would be totally out of the question for me.

I wear glasses with similar lens as yours. I only realized I had myopia after starting to go to university, and I only realized I had astigmatism around 2 years later. I guess the brain learns to correct the image, at the expense of some headache if you depend too much on it.

I'm struggling to think of a road sign that isn't either placed well in advance of when you need it, or something like a stop sign where blurriness doesn't matter.

Just street names, I guess? Those are a pain to navigate by anyway. You often already want to be in a lane by the time you can read the sign. The proper the way to relieve that mental burden is to have a navigator or GPS.

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