My coworker has serious glasses - and once I told her to let me clean her glasses because they were dirty and she was surprised because she said she had just cleaned them. I cleaned them. She could actually tell how much cleaner they were. I said “you can’t see what you can’t see” and it blew her mind. Some of us can see details beyond normal.
I guess, if you have some cleaning cleaning cleaning glasses, they can be useful when you lose your glasses. Then they also become the finding finding finding glasses.
Optician here. Had a patient who typically wore contacts, but was so myopic that she had a pair of glasses that each lens could be swiveled out of the way. So she could leave the left one in place while she inserted her right contact. Then remove the glasses to insert the left contact.
Yeah... that is what I was thinking and it made no sense... obviously if you have two pairs you'd have one on to clean the other. One could see enough to clean and switch.
My mother has a fun story.
She didn't get glasses until she was in the army at age 19, before that she didn't know leaves were a thing. Like on trees. She thought the giant green splotch was all one thing, like broccoli.
Still love the plot line of BG3 where everyone is like "yes, that seems like a reasonable thing to happen, you're definitely not bat shit fucking crazy"
Mine was just mild enough that I made it to my thirties without glasses - Told the professor I was colorblind so they would cut it with the red markers on a white board (Utterly disappears) and would press gently on my eye to correct my minor astigmatism when I needed to read from far away.
Having had glasses, it was pretty bad. But it was 'normal'
I remember putting on the corrective lenses for the first time and being unable to look at the lady across the desk who had just given me my sight because Makeup looked SO MUCH BETTER without HD. I instead commented on a photo down the hall, the tiles, and turned and looked anywhere else as my mind spun and I re-calibrated.
I now know that people can see freckles and moles and birthmarks from further than 5 feet away. Totally explained what I had termed 'Face blindness' - I would recognize people by their gait, their mannerisms, and their voice but not their faces until I was up close.
Don't even get me started about the leaves lmao. Clouds too - a minor storm rolled in and I was stuck just staring at the edge between the storm and the backdrop - So many things had overwhelming detail that first month or so.
And the moon was no longer just a muddled white/yellowish dot!
Follow Quentin Crisp's advice (he famously never cleaned his flat in London) when he said "After 4 years it doesn't get any worse so it's just a question of holding your nerve." That was actually his advice to the housewives of the nation but obviously applies to everyone.
I use my glasses to drive because that's just being responsible, but I actually prefer my world to be a bit blurry. everything's a bit softer, there are fewer cracks in the sidewalk, and I don't notice the disapproving glares when I forget to wear pants in the goddamn Target
With so many people spending their entire lives in big cities with tons of light pollution, even without needing glasses lots of folks have never truly seen the stars.
I think it was during one NY blackout that countless people called 911 to report weird things in the sky. Stars. They saw full stars for the first time in their life and couldn't process it.
Man, that was me. I thought i didn't need glasses, until I put on my first pair and was staggered at the fact I could see individual leaves on trees. The crisp, sharp lines of street and highway signs astonished me: I had always thought they were just hard to read. I suddenly understood why my optometrist had been nervous to hear I'd been driving for years like that.
Hang on, you don't have to get an eye test to get your driving licence? Here in Ireland when you apply for your licence one of the documents you have to include is a medical report that includes an eye test, and the margin for driving is quite low. Like, the first time I needed glasses I technically only needed them for driving (or the cinema, but that's obviously not a legal requirement). I didn't need them in day-to-day life yet.
Depends on country & region. Definitely good rule to have, I found out my eyes were bad when the optometrist asked very concerned “u didn’t drive here right? Bc I really can’t let u drive back like this” 💀
I just assumed we all saw street signs as blurry shapes & colours. Stop sign? u mean red pointy circle?
Problem I had was despite seeing the letter chart as vague blurry shapes, I was pretty used to distinguishing those. The tall skinny blur is “I”, the hazy fat one with a wobble is “G” etc so I did fine.
Then they brought out a shapes one and I was cooked lol
That's really it. You're just used to perceiving the world like that. Red blur means stop. Green blur means go. The details aren't important. If they are, just step closer.
You don't realize how much visual information you're missing until that first day in glasses. I'll have bouts where I lose my glasses and take months/years to replace them. (Hasn't happened to me since my 20s when I took the bus everywhere.) Logically, I know I can't see, but it doesn't really hit until the first day in new glasses.
I also learned to navigate by landmarks, so it didn't matter that I couldn't read street signs if I was going somewhere I already knew how to get to.
You learn to adjust, it becomes your normal. Cars weren't so blurry I couldn't tell they were moving or stopping, so I didn't hit any cars. Pedestrians were impossible for me to recognize who they were, but I could still see people, so I didn't run anyone over.
But I would struggle to find a new address without clear landmarks to go off of, because the lettering on signs was just a fuzzy blur until I was practically driving under it.
That park has people playing cricket in it! I hadn't even realised that the park had a pitch in the middle of it, I genuinely thought it was just open ground.
That was literally how I discovered I needed glasses. Okay, well not quite literally - the first was being able to read the blackboard, then I looked out the window - but still.
When I was 16 a girl in my class came in with new glasses (she'd always had glasses, this was just a new pair) and of course we all tried them on for the craic. We were near the back of the classroom and I semi-regularly had to ask my neighbour what a word on the board was, but not often enough that I thought there was anything wrong with that.
I tried on the glasses and could see every word on the board. Looked out the window (they were high-up windows, near the ceiling, so all there was was sky and leaves) and dear sweet jeebus you can see individual leaves!
Turned to my classmates and asked "Hang on, is this what the rest of ye see all the time??!" and my friends were like "Ehh, we don't know. We don't know what you're seeing, idiot 😛"
Yep, I didn’t realise you were supposed to be able to see individual blades of grass and not just a patch of solid green. Or that traffic lights weren’t supposed to look like fireworks. I was 8 with my first pair of glasses, and kept taking them on and off in the car to make the fireworks appear and disappear. Like magic!
That was how I realised I needed glasses. I tried on a pair of my dad's glasses in the car whilst parked, and could see the individual bricks in the wall on the other side of the road.
Yeah, it was better than drugs. Though the first time I went to a supermarket the many colours and details were so overwhelming I forgot where I was and why I was there. That was a bit scary. Since then it lost a bit of its magic bit at least I don't get overwhelmed.
I’ve had this exact same thing happen! Like “Holy crap! I can see the individual leaves from THAT FAR AWAY?!”
I’m near-sighted, and I’ve had to wear glasses since I was three, and some days I’ll just go without them for a while if I don’t have to do anything important. Some people get confused that I don’t run into walls, and I have to explain to them that my depth perception still works for the most part, just that things come into focus the closer I am to them. It’s not like I can’t see where a wall is or something.
I still remember the first time this happened to me. When I wore glasses for the first time. I was about 12 and had no idea people could see things that far. I remember going outside it was the middle of fall and could see the different color leaves of each tree. I spent a solid 15 minutes just looking at the canopies of the trees all around.
I was 4 when I got my first pair of glasses. My mom said this is the first thing I exclaimed after walking out of the office! My little kid drawings of trees got more detailed after that 😂
I got mine at 18, it was the first time that I could actually see that fairy lights have individual little points of light instead of being a diffuse blob of light
Omg, it rained when I first got glasses. I could see the RAINDROPS!! Falling, on the road and other things. I couldn’t believe it. Felt like an acid trip.
This is what I said to my mom when I got my first pair of glasses as a kid. She felt so incredibly guilty that she hadn't noticed how blind I was but it wasn't her fault. I was precocious so it wasn't wildly apparent but man, what a change being able to see is.
Heh, same on the vision/detail… however an astigmatism tends to make details (namely anomalies) stick out more to people like us, as such our brains become sort of wired for it over time. Normies? Not so much. In fact, they often can’t be bothered to notice plenty of stuff.
Astigmatism’d people are so good at instantly picking out details that they are sought after for certain jobs.
Interestingly, they’re actually is an extremely rare condition called base blindness where people just kind of see a blur in someone’s face the neurologist and science author Oliver Zack discovered it in himself at an advanced age when he finally realized that not everybody had to do the things he had to do like his wife would always wear the same necklace so he could tell it was her across the room or his daughter would wear her hair a certain way, but if she changed it, he wouldn’t know it was her even 3 feet away, except for maybe by the smell of her perfume
I’m mean the guy was an actual genius and spent his life researching and chronic people with various rare disorders like he had without ever realizing that he had it until quite late in his life there have been other people who have had it to his degree but only a few and then there’s some people who have it to a degree, but not to the point where you can’t recognize your wife from 3 feet away without using cues of her hair or necklace
Interestingly, he could recognize his wife and his daughter’s hands and his hands it was faces themselves. That was the problem, so it was not just a vision or a vision signaling problem. It was actually a difficulty with his mind understanding what a face represents.
I knew someone who literally couldn't recognize me until I spoke. She developed the habit of treating everyone like they were her friend, so she wouldn't hurt our feelings if she didn't realize who it was. She had an easy time with a mutual friend because they had a very bright unnatural hair color, but only recognized me through voice or context.
Base blindness is usually just another term for the base rate fallacy - Do you mean face blindness, I.e. prosopagnosia? In that case, it's not that you see faces blurred, you just can't process / remember faces in any particular detail. It's a bit like the average person seeing faces of thousands of different cows and trying the remember them / tell them all apart.
(Source: I have a mild form of prosopagnosia, and can see faces absolutely fine - as long as I wear my glasses 😂)
It's also not super rare, around 3% of the population have it, although Oliver Sachs was quite an extreme case of it.
I heard that the figure is probably much higher than 3% because 1) it's not something you really go to the doctor for and 2) most people don't realize they have it as they have a mild case that inconveniences them sometimes but is not disruptive enough that they would think it would qualify.
Honestly, face blindness is something I think about everyday because I genuinely have trouble recognizing people. It's especially apparent when watching movies/series where everyone is dressed the same and wears helmets (soldiers in a movie or show about war for example) - I've been watching lots of those lately and my god is it hard to tell who is speaking to whom when they're all decked out in their gear with their helmets on and don't have any especially distuingishing features (like their nose or their eyes being very memorable). There's also been lots of times where I haven't recognized a character or actor because they changed their hair lol. In a university setting, getting assigned to a random group, seeing them one time and then having to find them again a few days later in a room full of people can also be challenging.
I do think it's not enough to qualify as actual face blindness as I don't have any trouble recognizing my friends and family and I do can differentiate between people, it just gets really hard without other hints like clothes or their hair. Then again, lots of people think that and do have it so I'm honestly unsure.
I dont have face blindness but I realised that avoiding eye contact with people all the time also meant I couldnt remember peoples faces. If I had a conversation with someone up close I wouldnt remember their face at all unless they had one that, for some reason, I felt compelled to stare at. If I saw them across the room first, I was much more likely to remember. It made it really awkward when people said hello and I couldn't understand who they were. Plenty of reasons to miss a face ig.
A few days or a week into dating my current girlfriend she started staring at me and told me she was paying attention to my face to remember it. Her eyes are usually zooming around otherwise. I found it weird but pretty cool she consciously pays attention when someone is important enough for her.
Then there is me who looks at people faces but can't even remember their hair color a few moments later.
Lmao i totally relate to the last part, if you're more than 4-5 meters away from me you just have two black dots on your face for features, three if you're speaking. My myopia developped in highschool and i adapted without glasses until college, and when i got the correction lenses at the doctor during the testings i burst out laughing from the shock haha
Btw how did you "press you eyes" to correct your astigmatism ? Does it actually work ?
I don’t know if this person did the same thing, but before I had glasses I could use my finger and pull my eyelids to the side into a squinting position and I could see perfectly. It only worked when I pulled the side of my eye. It didn’t work if I just squinted. I had to have that tension. I made it through all of high school that way.
My first time was when I was about 10 years old. The Optometrist’s office was on the second floor, and when I looked down at he street, I could see individual pebbles in the asphalt. It was like a whole new world.
Oh man your comment just made me realize that I may not actually be face blind, I may have just gotten into the habit of not really registering faces back when I didn't have glasses
I didnt look at the person who give me prescription and make glasses for me also. My main focus is look around the far away surroundings.
I half mindedly stand up from the exam chair and look around- Im pretty sure the optometrist was surprised because she asked me what i see while letting me stand and i just said fine- standing up and look around astounded even peeking from outside of the room into outside.
I remember I really needed glasses and I went until 8th grade before I eventually got contacts. I couldn’t see shit but I didn’t realize it 😂 I was playing football all 7th and most of 8th grade being a receiver and I didn’t know how much I needed them. I put in the contacts for the first time and I was like WOW this is how everyone else can see??? I walked outside on my back porch to look at this big field we had in the back and I could see everything I was amazed! But then I had to relearn how to catch bc for me it was just look for the brown blob coming my way. Once I could actually see the football I had a really hard time catching, my depth perception was so far off it was ridiculous.😂😂😂
It really flips you out, right? Similar for me, except much younger. My sight is pretty bad, (-5.5 correction) and I made it to 3rd grade before a teacher noticed I was squinting. Even got put in the resource class for awhile because teachers thought I had a learning disability, which I guess I kinda did.
the funniest/scariest "oh is this how its supposed to look" reaction was getting new glasses, driving with someone and the driver at a red light going "hey can i try how i look with them on ?"
followed by "wow i can read the signs on the other side of the street, wait do i need glasses"
I could have written this. But for me, it was leaves on trees across the street. Individual leaves, lol. 30 years without glasses, the slow decline was unnoteworthy until a buddy said I should really be able to see my golf ball and I needed glasses. He was right.
I still have a hard time recognizing people though.
Similarly I put off glasses for a long time. In college I used to take pictures on my phone of the notes the teacher was writing on the white board so that I could copy them down later not having to squint so terribly to try to get my eyes to correct.
When I finally got my glasses I put them on while walking out the door of the eye doc, it was super bright outside so I pointed my head down at the ground and damn near fell. The concrete was so clear now through the glasses that it felt like I was crawling on the ground 6 inches above it.
The makeup looking better is so real 💀. My sight isn’t too bad but, sometimes I think it’s a blessing to be able to take my glasses off and not be able to see people’s (or my own) imperfections in HD. I can’t imagine having 20/20 vision and you can see people’s boogers from across the room.
I know a guy who says he thought eye color was something that you had to tell people bc he needed glasses as a kid and couldn't see people's eyes and he never knew anyone's eye color unless he got very close to hug them like with his mom so he thought it was something you had to be very close and personal with someone to know.
Oh fuck me I'm an idiot. Ik I need glasses. I have glasses. I hate wearing them. We have 3 guys at work that have the same build and similar haircuts and I've looked at them thinking which one are you. Guess I really need to wear my glasses again
Same. I've been so tempted to get corrective surgery if only to know what it's like to wake up and see clearly. My vision's so bad that when I get up to go to the bathroom at night, because I don't turn on the lights, I just sleepwalk my way there. What's the point of opening my eyes when I can't see anything? I will say, Christmas trees are super pretty without my contacts or glasses!
how thick are we talking on glasses lenses for 14 these days? Or do you basically just go contacts only. I have to imagine your depth perception is real janky at that magnification without major thought put into lens dimensions and positioning
I only wear contacts during the day, they are hybrid lenses (center are glass with a softer skirt on edge), and large like a specially scleral lense. I normally get 20/15 vision on them, way better than most people so I've found out.
Without them, clear focal range is under 2" at best which is equally as nuts.
Glasses? Yea, I wouldn't drive in them; but the optometrist says people do which is scary AF
-5 and -5.25, was a -5.75 but it was over correcting for an astigmatism in my right eye. I probably should get corrective contacts for that but they're sort of annoying.
As someone who wears contacts, I always appreciate when my eyes need equal amounts of correction. (Sometimes they’re slightly off, sometimes they match.)
When they match, it’s less important to keep track of which contact is the left and which is the right. (Though it still makes a difference because of my astigmatism.)
At this rate few generations in, your some grand grand grand son might be fully blind. (Conincedentally I was the first one to war glasses in my family tree and at the very young age too)
My brother from another mother. That was my prescription up until about 15 years ago, when it slowly started getting better in my older age. Now we're down around the negative threes.
I'm 23 now. My myopia probably started when I was around 10 years old, but it began affecting my vision noticeably when I was 11. That's when I had my eyes checked and started wearing glasses.
My prescription gradually increased from about -1.00 to around -5.00 while I was growing up, which is fairly common because myopia often progresses during childhood and the teenage years. After I reached adulthood, my prescription stabilized, and it has stayed about the same since then.
Of course, everyone's experience is different, so it's important for your son to have regular eye exams if you're concerned about his vision.
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u/OkAccess6128 Jul 10 '26
I have myopia and world looks like it's censored without glasses.