[jabroni_salad]

Somewhere between ages 40-50 everyone's eyes lose their ability to refocus. Instead of having a limited range of focus, you will have a single fixed point and your prescription will be changed to suit that need, or maybe you will have multiple pairs of glasses for different situations (computer glasses, car glasses, etc). Look forward to it!

Telling people about this is one of those xkcd 'my hobby:' things for me. It seems like it is widely not in our public health curriculum even though it is something almost all humans will get to enjoy at that age.

[kwhitefoot]

Not everyone. I am 66 and do not need glasses either for reading or driving. My sight is clearly not as good as it was though.

So what proportion of people really lose all focussing ability before the age of 50?

[Normille]

I'm mid 50s now and, over the past couple of years have noticed a deterioration in how close I can focus. My minimum focussing distance is probably about 30-40cm now. Which means, as long as the font size isn't minuscule, I can still read most things by holding them slightly further away. I 'joke' that as long as my my focal length is shorter than my arm, I can avoid the embarrassment of having to adopt reading glasses.

In this respect, the fact that a lot of the reading we do these days is on-screen, is a godsend, as you can generally increase the font size. However, I do carry a wee magnifying lens in my pocket for those times when I'm out and about and can't make out the small print on the label of something I'm thinking of buying.

Someone said, in effect, "So what. I've worn glasses since I was 11". I think that misses the point. It's not wearing glasses per se that's the problem. For those of us who have always had sharp eyesight [Of which I'm one. My long vision is still pin sharp] it's just another depressing sign of the descent into old age and decrepitude --like losing your hair, becoming harder of hearing, etc. and, irrational though it is, I think most of us feel that, if we can mask the symptoms for a while longer then somehow we've not actually reached that stage yet.

On the subject of this thread; I read a week or so ago [on HN?] about experiments showing that exposure to long wavelength red light in the mornings could 'rejuvenate' ageing eyes. I can't find that link at the mo'.

[swader999]

Yep, that's me right now. Gets a little worse every year.