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Wellness Wednesday for January 15, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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It has come to this: Halfway through life, I must don glasses.

Please give me your best, least obvious or highest benefit-cost-ratio tips and advice for the newly bespectacled.

Edit: Context: Apparently I'm nearsighted and have Astigmatism. I already got a first pair of glasses; plastic lenses in a very simple frame. Not the sturdiest (I wanted it to be fairly light), but not exactly wireframe either. Cost me around 250€. My parents regularly shell out 1000€-2500€ for glasses, so this seemed an acceptable price. No extra features though.

Learn how sensitive you are to chromatic aberration. The last time I updated my prescription, they upsold me to high-index lenses, which are thinner and lighter than regular CR-39 and don't gain any yellow tint from UV exposure, but I simply couldn't wear them at all due to their low Abbe number. Everything not dead ahead of me had colored outlines. I went back and demanded CR-39 lenses and a partial refund.

To add to @SubstantialFrivolity's answer, consider photochromic sunglasses. I own a pair of regular prescription sunglasses because I hate the look of photochromic lenses, but it's quite annoying when you have to venture indoors:

  • either you look weird wearing sunglasses indoors
  • or you take them off and have to do this weird squint with your mouth agape to read the prices
  • or you take your regular pair of glasses with you as well and look like a total dad with one pair hanging off your shirt collar and the other on your face

Oh, and get an extra pair to keep in your glovebox.

One note on the photochromic lens suggestion: do not try to use these as your only pair of glasses (like I did). If you're in a situation where you need to be in photos outside, they will darken (which may or may not be an issue for the specific photo, I suppose). Blue light filter will also show up in photos (your glasses will have a blue tint to them). I wound up getting a new pair of plain clear lenses for my wedding just so that I would look normal in the wedding photos.

They also don't work in the car, which is one of my big use cases for sunglasses. It's a bummer.