PSA: Always wear UV-protective glasses when under natural light
Posted: Sun Mar 30, 2025 12:35 pm
After a week of having made myself suffer in existential dread following a hasty scheduling of laser eye treatment that I ultimately ended up canceling, I have come to have a renewed appreciation for my glasses. In particular, I learned of the harmful effects of UV rays which can degrade proteins in your eye lens, accelerating the formation of cataracts, and can cause sunburns and even cancer on the surface of your eye. I didn't ever really think about walking around in direct sunlight without eye protection as being as bad for your eyes as smoking is for your lungs, but that really seems to be the case. Read more about it here: https://www.aao.org/eye-health/tips-prevention/sun
It's extremely important for everyone, even people who don't normally wear glasses, to put on a pair of sunglasses with a UV-blocking coating when going outside (the level of tint does not matter). Better yet, wear a wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves/pants to reduce the risk of getting skin cancer (and try to get vitamin D by other means, like supplements). Vision is such an important thing and people tend not to give much thought to their eye health, and it's true that if you're young you've got quite a while before you have to worry about losing your vision, but come cataract surgery day you're going to regret not having done the simple act of wearing sunglasses outside all those years prior. (I'm a futurist and I hope that in the near future we'll have nanotech and AI that is able to reverse aging on a molecular level, but still, it's always best to be safe)
Anyways, this is a message I would like to stream into the brain of every single person on the planet, but for now this is the best I can do. It's particularly relevant now for those of us in the northern hemisphere where Spring is starting. So yeah, wear your shades.
It's extremely important for everyone, even people who don't normally wear glasses, to put on a pair of sunglasses with a UV-blocking coating when going outside (the level of tint does not matter). Better yet, wear a wide-brimmed hat and long sleeves/pants to reduce the risk of getting skin cancer (and try to get vitamin D by other means, like supplements). Vision is such an important thing and people tend not to give much thought to their eye health, and it's true that if you're young you've got quite a while before you have to worry about losing your vision, but come cataract surgery day you're going to regret not having done the simple act of wearing sunglasses outside all those years prior. (I'm a futurist and I hope that in the near future we'll have nanotech and AI that is able to reverse aging on a molecular level, but still, it's always best to be safe)
Anyways, this is a message I would like to stream into the brain of every single person on the planet, but for now this is the best I can do. It's particularly relevant now for those of us in the northern hemisphere where Spring is starting. So yeah, wear your shades.