I've been wearing glasses most of my life. I first got glasses when I was in my first year of middle school, so I was around 12 or 13. For the first few years I had them, my prescription would change every year. Every visit to the eye doctor resulted in stronger lenses. This lasted until I got to high school. From then all through my 20s and 30s, my prescription didn't change once. That record finally ended when I hit 40 when I developed a vertical misalignment and started seeing double images, one above the other, necessitating a prism in my glasses. I guess that means no more contacts for me. So it goes. 

The new prescription fixed that issue but adjusting to the new lenses proved difficult and I had headaches and eye pain for a few weeks. The next year I slowly started to see double images again, so the vertical alignment problem was getting worse. New glasses. I'm mostly used to the prism effect now, but it  still takes me a few seconds to adjust every time I put on my glasses.

<center>![](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/dbooster/23w2gVLErD4ooDRvJr4QVqKJbq7BN3pgvZphyiEGwK9JiCaMh8sWPFoEKBp3YWugmfTrG.jpg)
<sup>Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/ryanmcguire-123690/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=388987">Ryan McGuire</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=388987">Pixabay</a></sup></center>


Now recently I'm finally starting to get the middle age problem with reading things close up, causing me to push my glasses forward on my nose and look above them when I have to read something close to me. That's a good look, let me tell you. I really don't want to upgrade to bifocals. I don't have a problem admitting my age, so that's not the reason I would rather not upgrade; rather, most old folks I talk with say that bifocals are really difficult to get used to—some tell me even after years, they never get used to them. I'd rather avoid that. 

In my avoidance of that upgrade, I decided to research healing vision naturally. It seems pretty intuitive to me that our vision gets worse because the eye muscles get weaker, mainly because we don't use them very much. That would seem to be why more and more and more kids wear glasses all the time—they just stare at screens all day and never look beyond twenty feet away, so their eye muscles get weak and indeed never really get strong in the first place. And we are all the same way. With the exception of when we drive, most of us probably never look much further than the other side of the room. Feel free to tell me that idea is completely off. I've never studied ophthalmology; I'm just going what seems logical. 

At any rate, I went to research it. I know I know... google research.... 

![](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/dbooster/EoEp8YCtQ75RdPuBsA3YVu5MvwAbwUNUTVoX6E93D3G16RGcYc7UMrgkVVjvC25BbqA.gif)

Believe me, I'm aware. But it's better than nothing, I suppose, as long as we are a little cautious in what we trust and keep a healthy doubt of everything. If nothing else, it's good to get some basic ideas that we can then use to for more creditable research. 

In my search I came across an interesting statement repeated several times by different eye doctors (or people claiming to be eye doctors). It was this: 

> Natural vision improvement **does work**.

Emphasis mine. But this statement is always followed by something like:

> But natural improvement is **slow** and **difficult**, so why do it when you can easily get glasses or an operation to repair your eyes?

I found it interesting that optometrists admit natural methods do actually work at improving our vision. I also found it interesting that they then essentially appeal to our laziness and desire for instant gratification by saying it's not worth the work for natural healing when you can get the results otherwise much more easily. 

To me the former seems much more attractive. Upgrading glasses every year is expensive and annoying. Even if I get the operation, eventually my eyes are going to start getting worse again, resulting in glasses once again or another operation. If I could naturally heal them, why would I not get started on that immediately, even if it did take several years of exercise to actually see any result or benefits?

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This brings me to the point of this essay which I hint at with the title: why do something hard when we can have it easily right now through other means? 

Why indeed. There seems no drawback (or little drawback) to doing things the easy way, so why not take advantage of it. The thing is, there is always a catch. In the case of eye health the catch is the easy way involves constant glasses upgrades to fight against the constantly declining eyesight and the possibility that by using eyeglasses we are making the problem worse and accelerating the decline. 

Now the side of doing something is not exactly straight-forward. Eye exercises are difficult and you may not see any effects for a long time, and even then, they might not work. We have to decide which of the two sides is best for us. Unfortunately people often choose the side that allows them to be the most lazy while I think the difficult but much more beneficial side is the more rewarding to do.

I see this same attitude in language learning a lot. Many Japanese people around me have the attitude of "why bother learning English when computer translation is not only good enough, but presumably will be pretty much perfect within a handful of years". I hear pretty much the exact same thing from foreigners about learning Japanese. I agree that computer translation will be more or less perfect fairly soon, within our lifetime. It will be like Star Trek with their universal translators. But does this mean we shouldn't bother studying another language? Certainly it's easier not to, and so most people go with that lazy option, usually making some justification for it to themselves. 

<center>![](https://files.peakd.com/file/peakd-hive/dbooster/243MDtshmmevmg9jmTK3eLwePgwgQ89jkGyBbaJ1TtWwVcpn155vJsFRBomik5H3BC3aC.jpg)
<sup>Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/geralt-9301/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=110777">Gerd Altmann</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com//?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=110777">Pixabay</a></sup></center>

Just as in the case of glasses, there is a catch here. The catch with language learning is that you will forever be dependent on a machine. What happens if you ever find yourself in a situation where that machine isn't available? Moreover, with computer translation you will still be *thinking* in your native language, which will limit your understanding of the culture which uses the language you are translating into. 

Again, I think the more difficult path—actually studying the foreign language—is much more rewarding. More difficult, sure, but potentially much more beneficial.

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At the most basic level, this tendency of humans to always pick the lazy option is one of the things that leads to procrastination. It's easy to delay, much much easier than doing what we need to do. It always seems harmless, because "hey, I *am* going to do it, just *later*". The problem is that *later* is always *later* and when we finally decide *later* is *now*, it's usually too late to do it well or even to do it at all. As the proverb goes: tomorrow is always tomorrow. 

![](https://images.ecency.com/DQmQN3UvtcX4kjnzYTvLn6CpaU3AVwo83Y4FnGtHQVMzRFr/thats_a_problem_for_future_homer_1068x712_1194323675.jpg)

(I vaguely remember a line with Homer being confronted with actually doing something and yelling at his past self for procrastinating, but I can't find any images with it. Comment if you know what I'm talking about.)

But I digress.

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Anyway, I think there is a lot of value in doing things we don't have to do, even if it means taking the harder path. To that end, I've started doing eye focus exercises in the morning and evening. This is when you look at somewhere far in distance (over 20-30 feet / 6-9 meters away) and then refocus your eyes without blinking to look at something a few centimeters in front of your face. I've found this is easy to do at a window: focus far off and, without changing my eye or head position, refocus on the screen on the window. I've seen some advice given in multiple places that this is a good place to start for eye exercises. I do twenty reps right now. I'll later add in a midday session after I make the morning and evening ones habit. I have no idea if these exercises will help improve my eyes, but trying never hurt anyone, eh? Better than taking the lazy path and not doing anything.


[divider]: https://images.hive.blog/0x0/https://images.ecency.com/DQmR3iwCn9yvwXDXfuNjmMX6FrjAvFfYQWgA4QRckpens1j/external_content.duckduckgo.png

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<td><img src="http://68.media.tumblr.com/9ed59bcbc3d0c81b382b0df883f91773/tumblr_inline_ni2uuza1ku1qz4uph.jpg" alt="Hi there!"></td>
<td><a href="https://hive.blog/about/@dbooster/about-david-laspina-v1-2">David LaSpina</a> is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku. He blogs here and at <a href="https://laspina.org">laspina.org</a>.</td>
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