Don’t ask me how I got into this, but I was reading up on myopia, i.e. nearsightedness, and I was shocked by how common it is — in parts of Asia up to 90% of the younger generation is nearsighted, with Western countries approaching the 50% mark…and it’s rising. The old wives’ tale is that too much reading as a kid makes you nearsighted…and it turns out, shockingly enough, that there is some truth to it, though science has revealed it’s not reading per se that causes nearsightedness, but rather a lack of exposure to outdoor light.
To wit, children who spend hours per day outside in ambient sunlight (where illumination levels are far greater, the spectrum is much richer, and the eye is more often focusing on more distant objects) experience eyeball growth that’s much closer to the ancestral norm, whereas children who are kept inside all day every day (i.e. the conditions heavily schooled populations experience; not coincidentally East Asia, precisely the part of the world children spend the most time studying (typically indoors), has the worst myopia) almost all become nearsighted.
I hear the Taiwanese government has combated this problem by forcing schools to keep children outside for 120 minutes a day every day they’re in school, and statistically significant reductions in nearsightedness have been observed. In the ideal case of course children would not be doing close-up work all the time and would be outside in the ambient sunlight.
Turns out that the alternate-historical science-fiction universe I write my stories in is exactly the kind of setting that would be happening; what we call “free-range” childhood is the norm, there are no schools to attend, workplaces as we know them are obsolete, and what work and learning is done can easily be done outside. Daylighting through skylights and open doors and windows is the norm, as are expansive patios and balconies. So among children and young people, nearsightedness would just not be ubiquitous like it is today.
Among hunter-gatherers (who spend basically all day outside and don’t do as much close-up work) the nearsightedness prevalence is thought to be 1-5%, and in a world of this nature we would expect modern populations to approach this; the odd kid or two would still need glasses or contacts to see well, but among young people it would be a mark of distinction, not just something anybody has (by comparison, it’d be less common than being left-handed, which has a natural prevalence of 10% or so).
So would we see some outdoors utopia, but otherwise with the same sort of technology we have today, like our phones, laptops, and tablets? Perhaps not…at least in my version of the science-fictional near future.
Consider the fascinating fact that newborns are almost universally far-sighted. For a baby’s eyes at rest, further away objects appear in focus and closer objects appear blurry; visual acuity right after birth is low (bordering on what would be considered legally blind in an adult) but improves quickly. We don’t notice this because infants don’t really need that much visual acuity, and because the infant eye is very adaptive; while further objects appear clearer when the eye is at rest, when the baby tries to focus he or she can see objects close-up clearly.
That same capacity for what’s called “accommodation” is carried to later stages in life, as the eye grows and visual acuity improves to more or less adult levels by toddlerhood; the eye of a child and even to a lesser extent young adult can focus with effort on a wider range of distances than their older counterparts — this decline in accommodation capacity with age is in fact the main cause of middle-aged and older adults needing “reading glasses”. If you have mildly far-sighted or even normal vision, there often comes a time when the eye just isn’t flexible enough to focus on close-up objects anymore.
Indeed, given visual development in strong outdoor lighting, more characteristic of the outdoor environment, the default is in fact for younger people to be slightly far-sighted, not just to have normal vision by our standards. Mild farsightedness in children and young adults is common even today; it stands to reason that with the spectrum being shifted away from nearsightedness and toward farsightedness, courtesy of the eye growing under rich outdoor lighting instead of low indoor lighting, that this is a world where children and young people are usually mildly farsighted.
Ordinarily we wouldn’t notice or care because these same young eyeballs can strain, squint, and focus on closer-up objects, and we call it a day…but in my setting beauty and youth are prized to the extent that teenagers starting on preventive botox is not just a curiosity of Beverly Hills elites but normal for the masses on a global scale. The ubiquitous idea is that strain and stress showing in the facial expression causes aging that really should not be taken as inevitable, but fought with the power of modern medicine. Quieting and smoothing the face is just part of skin care in this setting. The totally frozen forehead characteristic of heavy doses would presumably be more common among the masses of today, but one can assume that enough botox to still express but not to get strong lines whenever you so much as think or when the sun hits you would be standard.
And then we come to the question of the eyeballs; in a world like this, sure, the young people and the kids could strain their eyeballs, but why should they accept that stress which will undoubtedly prematurely age them? Why not fight it instead?
How would this battle be won? If the standard is that children’s and youth’s eyes should be at rest instead of strained or squinting, then the obvious solution would be…glasses and contacts! Mild reading glasses or “readers”, exactly like we prescribe to middle-aged and older people today…only in that world using “readers” for close-up work would be a marker of extreme youth, akin to wearing braces is in our world. Indeed, reading glasses might replace braces as one of the go-to markers of being very young, in as much as invisible aligners and so forth are far more advanced and common, to the point that the unsightly metal braces we’re accustomed to seeing on our kids’ smiles (blech) would be basically obsolete. The teeth are guided into their proper shape invisibly, but the farsighted young eye becomes much more visible.
All informed by real human biology, yet with a sociological result that seems rather alien. How can a worldbuilder resist?
It gets even better: yes, the kids could use reading glasses, but consider that there are technological solutions that would make reading glasses much less necessary. Consider that for a farsighted person using a screen, they would prefer it to be further away, but also larger in size so the text and visual information is easily visible. This militates against something like a laptop or especially a smartphone; as I type this blog post I’m using a laptop, and the furthest you can use it while still being able to type on the keyboard is perhaps two feet. A smartphone form factor (i.e. a touchscreen that’s designed to fit in your palm) is even worse. Separating the input devices (e.g. keyboard and mouse) from the screen is the obvious answer…which brings us right back to the classic desktop form factor.
Neat, huh? It might not look too much like a classic desktop from the 1990s though; at home you could have a very large screen in some cases maybe ten feet away from you on the wall (or mounted on some trellis outside *hint hint*); the keyboard and mouse are classic in our world, but consider there are other possibilities for controls. Doug Engelbart’s chorded keyboard perhaps is the coolest (and indeed chorded interfaces really might have been ubiquitous in a world where piano knowledge was much more widespread among the middle class…), but the only limit is really the imagination.
Haptic interfaces that use physical motions of the body are also quite obvious, as are touchpads more similar to what artists use for their “drawing tablets”. Even today there’s often a touchpad-like interface that connects with a more distant screen, so for a mildly farsighted young artist this more remote interface with the digital canvas…and for the artist who prefers to have direct contact with the canvas, there would always be reading glasses to prevent eye strain.
Likely the default scene would be a large-sized tablet-computer-like device held at arm’s length (even for a kid this would be easy by my alternate 20th century, since electronics and screens are very lightweight by this point), with the young artist using reading glasses to see it more easily. Could even be rather iconic as a symbol of the young artist; not only a drawing tablet, but those little reading glasses (which they’d eventually grow out of; again, this is real human biology, just with different sociological implications).
And needless to say all this tends to take place under strong outdoor light; perhaps not direct sunlight, considering the culture of this world also prizes fair skin still (then again sunscreen and skin whitening treatment takes care of that problem…), but even indirect sunlight is far stronger and richer than your average elementary school’s fluorescent lighting system today.
That doesn’t mean that every screen would be huge and far away, but it does mean that desktop-style interfaces remain the default, with laptops and smartphones having never truly taken over computing. And remember the 1-5% of kids who are nearsighted? They would be the ones who would adore a touchscreen device that you can hold in your palm close-up, so having a smaller screened device you read close-up (while still having your little glasses) would be very distinctive and niche…and may well give nearsighted kids an advantage, since the ability to focus on fine detailed work close-up without needing glasses would be less common in this world.
Though this is offset by the fact their entire world is designed for people who focus at longer distance when at rest, so they’d have to occupy a niche akin to left-handed kids who see fit to use tools designed the opposite of the “normal” way; mercifully this is likely also a world where left-handed scissors and various other tools are ubiquitous (a lot of these tools are custom-designed and 3D-printed on demand in the household anyway, with not just the plastic we’re familiar with but also refractory metals being possible to work with (thank you, cheap and abundant nuclear energy) so forging a left-handed tool would be trivial), so both left-handers and the nearsighted would be readily accommodated…it’s just that this is a subtly alien sociology where kids who can work close-in without straining the eye are “other”.
Again, how can a worldbuilder resist? Indeed, there are hints in my existing stories that just such a world as described might exist in the background; there are characters who don’t read much per se, they wear technology that reads text to them in the form of audio. One might question how literate they actually are, but perhaps (especially since they’re all quite young) they could just be experiencing what (in their world) is normal childhood mild farsightedness and the normal routine of not straining the eyes too much, yet they don’t like using reading glasses or using hulking huge screens (though one of these characters does use distant large screens a lot; hmm).
Again, lots of fun here, and frankly a lesson to be learned as well: if you look at human biology and development from first principles, and figure out “well, this is how it works now, but how could this work?”, “how could this be seen?”, “how does this trend among elites generalize if it goes truly global?”, et cetera, you end up with a rich tapestry that can hold up to some of the best social science fiction that’s out there. It subtly revises my own setting to consider all of this, but so far, I’m loving this line of thought, and as a worldbuilder and author, I intend to explore it further. 🙂