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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1250 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for January 15, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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It has come to this: Halfway through life, I must don glasses.

Please give me your best, least obvious or highest benefit-cost-ratio tips and advice for the newly bespectacled.

Edit: Context: Apparently I'm nearsighted and have Astigmatism. I already got a first pair of glasses; plastic lenses in a very simple frame. Not the sturdiest (I wanted it to be fairly light), but not exactly wireframe either. Cost me around 250€. My parents regularly shell out 1000€-2500€ for glasses, so this seemed an acceptable price. No extra features though.

Learn how sensitive you are to chromatic aberration. The last time I updated my prescription, they upsold me to high-index lenses, which are thinner and lighter than regular CR-39 and don't gain any yellow tint from UV exposure, but I simply couldn't wear them at all due to their low Abbe number. Everything not dead ahead of me had colored outlines. I went back and demanded CR-39 lenses and a partial refund.

To add to @SubstantialFrivolity's answer, consider photochromic sunglasses. I own a pair of regular prescription sunglasses because I hate the look of photochromic lenses, but it's quite annoying when you have to venture indoors:

  • either you look weird wearing sunglasses indoors
  • or you take them off and have to do this weird squint with your mouth agape to read the prices
  • or you take your regular pair of glasses with you as well and look like a total dad with one pair hanging off your shirt collar and the other on your face

Oh, and get an extra pair to keep in your glovebox.

Heh, I've come to consider "I can see the spectrum of light sources" as an amusing-but-useless superpower. It's pretty easy to discern between natural light and color LEDs, for example. But yeah, it could see it being disorienting pretty easily.

One note on the photochromic lens suggestion: do not try to use these as your only pair of glasses (like I did). If you're in a situation where you need to be in photos outside, they will darken (which may or may not be an issue for the specific photo, I suppose). Blue light filter will also show up in photos (your glasses will have a blue tint to them). I wound up getting a new pair of plain clear lenses for my wedding just so that I would look normal in the wedding photos.

They also don't work in the car, which is one of my big use cases for sunglasses. It's a bummer.

I recommend (if you can afford it) getting a pair of prescription sunglasses to go with your regular ones. Sunglasses don't go over glasses very well, so it's nice to have prescription ones when you are driving and the sun is in your eyes. Also, if your regular glasses break (as just happened to me recently) you can use the sunglasses as an emergency backup.

If you struggle with glasses sliding off your face, you can buy for ~negligible sums rubber grips/hooks that curl around your ear and keep them in place. In conjunction with fogging, and the awkwardness of getting someone else to adjust your glasses without disturbing the sterile field, I couldn't have made it through a surgical rotation without them.

https://amzn.eu/d/50D7mX8

(Also those prices you've mentioned strike my Indian sensibilities as fucking insane, not sure how much the cost of labor factors in)

Frankly, they strike me as just as insane. But everything here is expensive. Labor, energy, goods, rent. Life. Earn 3k€/M, feed a family of three, have 0€ left over at the end of the month.

My glasses don't fall off easily, but of course they're new. I hope it stays that way, though. I'm mostly annoyed by how they jump around on my nose when I make any sort of quick movement; but around the ears they seem solid enough.

Reading glasses? If yes, then the prescriptions are easy enough to find cheaply and in bulk. My parents typically order like a 5 pack of them and just sprinkle them around the house.

If lasik is at all an option do it. I only wish there were more thousand dollar procedures out there that could enhance my body.

Call around to find an optometrist who is willing to give you the pupillary distance as well as the prescription, then buy the glasses online through Zenni. Alternatively, if you only have the prescription, you can use a reversed or expired credit card to measure your pupillary distance at their website by taking a picture of your face with the card on your forehead. If you order during Black Friday, it is very cheap.

Get the maximum blue light protection possible. It will help you sleep and reduce eye strain and headaches. Get some clip-on sunglasses, too.

Two is one and one is none. Get three pairs. Nothing sucks more than not being able to find your glasses when you absolutely need to go out the door.

Get sturdy plastic glasses with as few moving parts as possible. Thin wire-frame glasses break way too often. They should look like this, not like this.

Frames vary widely in price for no apparent reason. I have seen virtually identical frames priced more than $100 apart. Get the cheap ones.

Two is one and one is none. Get three pairs. Nothing sucks more than not being able to find your glasses when you absolutely need to go out the door.

I can't agree with this. Having a tinted pair is often worth it (see my other post), but three pairs is way too much. Also, it's not hard to keep track of your glasses so you shouldn't ever be in the situation where you can't find them.

Maybe you just have better executive function than I do? All I can tell you is that three pairs have really saved my ass when one pair was long-term lost (later found between the bed and the wall), the second pair I was using was short-term lost (left in the bathroom) and I really had to go out the door to get to work.

Besides, each pair was only $30 (again, Zenni + Black Friday), so why not.

It sounds like maybe the problem is not having a place you consistently put them? If my glasses aren't on my face (or in my hands), they are in one of exactly two places: the nightstand next to my bed (while I sleep), or the bathroom vanity (while I shower). Consequently, losing my glasses just isn't a thing that happens in my life.

I have seen virtually identical frames priced more than $100 apart.

That’s not that bad. In France, they have a system where it’s obligatory for the employer to provide glasses insurance(1) . Then once a year the giddy employee can choose glasses with frames worth 600 dollars(2) “for free”.

(1) This costs him frequently around 100 dollars/month or more. There's some other random nonsense included in the insurance. A full set of glasses costs only like 50 dollars.

(2) They look exactly the same as frames worth 25 dollars. There’s a lot of ads for glasses in France.

My mom got a free amount of money towards glasses through Medicare, and it was use it or lose it, so she ended up getting glasses worth several hundred dollars for no reason right as the money was about to expire. She was pretty happy about it, too.

From "Against Tulip Subsidies" by Scott Alexander:

Americans take eight years to become doctors. Irishmen can do it in four, and achieve the same result. Each year of higher education at a good school – let’s say an Ivy, doctors don’t study at Podunk Community College – costs about $50,000. So American medical students are paying an extra $200,000 for…what?

Remember, a modest amount of the current health care crisis is caused by doctors’ crippling level of debt. Socially responsible doctors often consider less lucrative careers helping the needy, right up until the bill comes due from their education and they realize they have to make a lot of money right now. We took one look at that problem and said “You know, let’s make doctors pay an extra $200,000 for no reason.”

And to paraphrase Dirkson, $200,000 here, $200,000 there, and pretty soon it adds up to real money. 20,000 doctors graduate in the United States each year; that means the total yearly cost of requiring doctors to have undergraduate degrees is $4 billion. That’s most of the amount of money you’d need to house every homeless person in the country ($10,000 to house one homeless x 600,000 homeless).

I want to be able to say people have noticed the Irish/American discrepancy and are thinking hard about it. I can say that. Just not in the way I would like. Many of the elder doctors I talked to in Ireland wanted to switch to the American system. Not because they thought it would give them better doctors. Just because they said it was more fun working with medical students like myself who were older and a little wiser. The Irish medical students were just out of high school and hard to relate to – us foreigners were four years older than that and had one or another undergraduate subject under our belts. One of my attendings said that it was nice having me around because I’d studied Philosophy in college and that gave our team a touch of class. A touch of class!

This is why, despite my reservations about libertarianism, it’s not-libertarianism that really scares me. Whenever some people without skin in the game are allowed to make decisions for other people, you end up with a bunch of elderly doctors getting together, think “Yeah, things do seem a little classier around here if we make people who are not us pay $200,000, make it so,” and then there goes the money that should have housed all the homeless people in the country.

I'm putting off a first visit to an optometrist. I know what's coming.

According to mine, even if you have vision problems, it's only a necessity to deal with it either if it seriously hinders you in your daily life, or if you're still fairly young (younger than about 20, IIRC) so that your brain doesn't grow up wrong. If you already made it to middle age and you can live with your eyes as they are, then you can pass on glasses.

I for one was mostly just annoyed by the blurriness at a distance. I recalled seeing sharper when I was younger. But it wasn't a hindrance in any way.

Do you have to test your vision when renewing your driving license in Germany? Here the optometrists will put a "vision correction mandatory" on your certificate if your eye chart performance doesn't impress them.

You don't have to renew it. Unless you lose it somehow. But if you do need to get a new license, then yes, you also need to do the vision test again, and my optometrist did tell me that I probably wouldn't pass muster without glasses (which also means that I would get such a note on my driver's license). Whether that's true, who knows, maybe she just really wanted to make another sale that day, but it's technically possible.

Thanks. For me it's a relatively new inability to read at very close distances (eg phone with small text in bed). I've got a pair of off the shelf reading glasses from the department store which covers this so I'm going to hold out as long as I can.

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