I feel like I have a deep reliance on society and technology, because I can’t fucking see without glasses and I’m too scared to do Lasik lol (also expensive).
Your screwedness depends how bad your eyesight is. Can you see well enough to tell a weed apart from the crop you’re growing when looking at arms length? Then that’s all the eyesight you need to be useful to a community
Pretty much this. Even if your eyes are bad-bad, generally you can find a task you can do, even if it’s “go spread fertilizer on the crop beds over here” or “hold this metal down at this end while I hammer the other end into shape.” People with bad eyesight have historically survived in conditions nearly identical to what a commune of survivors would be facing if the T-virus decided to escape tomorrow or whatever, it’s not magic. Depending on the community you wind up with, you will have SOMETHING that you can do to meaningfully contribute even without eyeglasses.
I believe that our eyesight is worse than it’s been historically. Sunlight shows eye growth and we get less of it today than 1000 years ago.
It didn’t really change the point we can be mostly somewhat valuable, but there may be more if it’s with worse eyesight today.
We’re fucked. Our genes told us.
I know of a YouTuber called the blind homesteader. He has family and friends help him. They have quite the homestead and he often helps the community around his homestead too.
If you have or can scavenge a laser pointer, just go hog wild shining it all around in your eyes. You have nothing to lose trying it at that point and maybe you get lucky and give yourself DIY lasik.
Pretty sure LASIK involves cutting open your cornea and affecting the aqueous fluid to correct the refraction. They don’t just shoot lasers into your eyes to make you see good
Agree to disagree.
I was going to say that I’d trust my luck more with a post-apocalypse optician than post apocalypse lasik and I think you make my point quite well.
💀
Not that useful in scenarios except for reading: if you curl your hands in front of your eye and leave a very tiny opening you can create a pinhole that’ll make a tiny bit of your view in focus
Photo from Minute Physics demonstrating what you need to do for that:
Neat! I have really strong vision, but know how to force them out of focus. It’s weird not being able to blur my vision when I’m doing this.
Been using this trick to read my alarm clock since I was ten!
You could make “glasses” out of wood or bone with thin slits using the same idea
Just like the Inuit snow goggles
I do much the same, make a tube out of my hands like I’m using a monocular. Works!
People who wear glasses are screwed but not as screwed as people who rely on medication.
But I’ll thrive with my untreated ADHD (unlikely)!
I dunno, reading through common ADHD traits sometimes sounds like a description of the perfect post-apoc survivor lol
Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s an adaptive trait, just one that isn’t useful anymore. It wouldn’t be good for everyone to have ever, but it probably was useful for some people to have. Just like most people are more awake during the day, you’d want some people awake at night to keep everyone safe, so we have “night owls” who are maladjusted to the typical work hours we have today.
I always imagined that ADHD was just our minds tuned to being hunter-gatherer survivors, and thus not suited for a sedentary office environment.
I have trained my children from a young age that, in case of zombie outbreak or alien invasion, I am to be left behind. I require far too many medications to function in a post-apocalyptic setting.
I too am certain to die so my plan is to heroically sacrifice myself. Full on “I got this” while my friends are pulled away screaming “nooooooooooooooooooo!”
I wanted to train my kids to do this, but my spouse rolled their eyes and asked, “Why would we willingly give up a weapon for you to have a last stand?”
Yep! I plan to lead the zombies off while playing a banging tune on my phone.
Mountain Goats are always a good choice.
What oddly specific training. Is there a training regimen for a “Evangelion everyone got turned into Tang” situation too? What about the “Just got spider powers and a Canon event may be coming”?
They were young and zombie movies were everywhere. In the way of all children, the questions were non-stop. This was also the time I was bedridden, so I convinced them that zombies only went after healthy people.
My partner and I have discussed our wildly different willingness to try to survive in a post-apocalyptic world plenty of times over the years. He would work to survive and would probably thrive more than the average survivor. Me? I’ve always said I’ll likely head to the cough syrup section of the pharmacy.
This conversation came up earlier today, in fact. Well, I was recently diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I’m still sorting out the right medication to get it under control and am dealing with a lot of pain, but way less than before starting treatment. I told him with this diagnosis, if society ever collapses in a way that causes me to be unable to get my medication? I’m out.
I’m on the same page. I’ve spent most of my adult life testing the limits of my skills, wit, and badassery. My conclusion from that is that I am not a badass and have no interest in trying to survive societal collapse.
Do we have surviving scientists and engineers, or books? Then everything is easy-ish: Progress took time because we didn’t know anything, everything was trial and error. Now we know the correct forms of physical laws or their usable approximations so rebuilding is just a matter of time (generations maybe).
If somehow the collective wisdom is lost, back to the stone ages with you.
Eye glasses started showing up around 1300 AD. Implies the basic tech / processes required to make them is relatively simple, given that they’ve been around in some form ever since the middle ages. Granted, they wouldn’t be as sophisticated as they are today, and many people with very niche issues would suffer.
Anything more modern, requiring microchips or heavily integrated international supply chains would go poof. Personally, I’d worry about dental and medical stuff we diagnose with x-rays. Like it’s not too uncommon for people to have a root canal these days… but it didn’t become a more ‘common’ thing until around the 1800-1900 period. Hell, getting your wisdom teeth pulled in a post-event world would likely suck some serious ass.
The way glasses worked in the beginning though was that you’d make a bunch of lenses and people would try a lot of them until they found one (or two) that let them see a little better.
It wasn’t anything like what you’d expect nowadays.That’s how it would work in a post apocalypse too. People who wear glasses right now are typically on vision plans that allow for a new pair every year. I have like 5 old pairs, 4 of which no longer are really strong enough.
So depending on how far down the road post apocalypse you either randomly go through houses until you find a pair good enough, or if enough time has passed there will almost certainly be people specializing in selling glasses and medical things.
Now if you are far sighted all you have to do is walk into any abandoned CVS and go look through the huge rack of cheater lenses they have.
We could rely on scavenging what’s already been made. Even if it isn’t your exact prescription, a little might be better then nothing.
It took centuries to get to disposable contact lenses while trying to figure out the physics, both in optics and in manufacturing any sort of spectacles, at the same time.
Will the survivors of the apocalypse be able to pick up where we left off or will they essentially start from scratch? That depends on the apocalypse and on the survivors. Do documents and knowledge survive, perhaps in a stash or in digital form? Do the survivors include an optician or a material engineer? Chances look good if that’s the case. If no, life will get a lot harder for many people.
Restarting production chains and manufacturing facilities is going to be the biggest bottle neck.
If we imagine something like climate change wiping out 99% of the population, there just aren’t enough people to do all that. It’s going to be all hands on deck just to produce enough food for everyone. It will take a few centuries of rebuilding to get to that point.
for less people you need less manufacturing capacity
You’ll have to hit up the local glasses stores. Luckily there’s plenty of em.
You’ll be okay, OP. It will be extra shitty though. Imagine running from a horde of cannibalistic raiders and you drop your glasses…
Jokes on them, I didn’t take good care of myself and am under constant stress. My meat is probably foul AF.
I assumed surviving doctors would do for people what they did for sawyer in lost.
Use what you can find to get as close as you can per eye.
Other than that, sucks to suck, And I say that as somebody who is both near sighted and far sighted.
One would think that if most of society is toast there will be a shitload of left over glasses that could be collected and then distributed to those in need.
Glasses aren’t all the same, you know. What if you have a really crazy prescription?
Out of all the people with glasses in the world, there’s somebody who’s almost guaranteed to have the same eyes.
Your mission is to find that person, and steal their glasses.
I have never put on a pair that was even close to my prescription. In fact, this post made me realize I’ve been wearing my old glasses all day and that’s why I have a headache.
There are always exceptions to the rule. There are people that have super special prescriptions and then there are other people that just have the standard stuff due to age, etc.
Based on that, the majority of people would have a pair that match them. Anyone else with special glasses would be shit out of luck because as the title says it’s the end of the world and only a few peops left.
Let’s not be ruled by exceptions to the rule. It is only a tiny amount.
For myopia, only an issue for a couple of generations. If we’re living off the land again, myopia will stop being a thing as in the past.
Aristotle was writing about myopia over 2000 years ago…
True but the rates of myopia were minuscule compared to today. Bad phrasing: not a thing insofar as it barely affected anyone.
Still owes me 20 bucks, just sayin
Rather short sighted of him to let interest build up over thousands of years!
I see what you did there.
But the first generation of survivors is gonna live like hell without glasses.
