As a person who recently wore contacts every day until dry eyes and an injury forced me to switch back to glasses, I have almost entirely the opposite experience. It bothers me to wear glasses again. My prescription is quite strong, so it creates a pretty significant distortion, stronger towards the edges of the lenses. It's hard to do sports, as I now have a background fear about losing/breaking them, and the distortion messes with my hand/eye coordination. I had an episode skiing where I actually got nauseous from disorientation. As a result I do far less sports and that leads to other things. Ultimately, it has kind of screwed up my sense of scale of things, too, because the glasses make everything appear a bit smaller.

When I take off my glasses the distortion goes away, of course, but I can't read street signs, see people's expressions, watch movies, and other things. Watching an incredible sunset or mountain scene with my own eyes...it's like looking at a 200x100 pixel image Gaussian blurred to fill the whole field of view.

I might agree with you if my prescription is less, but TBH I wish I could get rid of these damn spectacles.

On the other hand, it did teach me a bit about philosophy. E.g. now I realize that to see the world "clearly" I require lenses, I just never noticed before. All of my perception is actually through lenses, not just my eyes. Touch, taste, smell, feeling, all distorted by my senses. And it feeds into my mind, the biggest, most distorted lens of all :)

If you don't mind can you share how your contacts damaged your eyes? I wear daily disposables almost everyday and sometimes forget to remove them at night... is that how you damaged your eyes?

In my case my eyes just kept getting drier and drier, and that eventually caused conjuctivitis (inflammation of the eyelid and the covering of the eye). It was mistaken for an eye infection originally. Conjuctivitis + contacts led to an injury of the epithilium, either caused by the contacts literally bonding to and ripping off the epithilium, or by debris being caught and scratching, unable to be washed away due to lack of moisture. The symptoms were cloudy, blurry vision, itchiness, sensitivity to light, and pain. Cloudy vision and pain are f'in scary.

In my case I ended up with lesions that had to be treated with antibiotics, lubricating gel, and a kind of "bandage" contact lens, since the inflammation of the eyelids can cause further damage of the eye.

Please do be careful with your eyes. Don't sleep in your contacts, use lubricating drops, and if you feel debris or other discomfort, take them out!

I was lucky thanks to antibiotics warding off any potential infection. An infection coupled with an injury can threaten your sight. The prognosis is generally pretty good for minor epithilium and corneal damage, usually. For me, it was mind-alteringly painful, but after healing my vision is pretty much perfect with the glasses I had before. Despite being annoyed by my glasses, I am truly thankful that I can see! It is hard to communicate what 2 weeks in a dark room with the question of blindness stirring in your head can make you face.

not a candidate for lasik?

No, given that my eyes are already so dry, and this plus contacts led to me injuring my corneas on more than one occasion, one of which meant I spent ~2 weeks in a dark room, essentially blind. So doctors recommend I do not do Lasik. :(

ah bummer. yeah i had noticable dryness after mine, which went away only after a few months.

contacts are really dangerous, and i feel like this is not emphasized nearly enough. i didn't even realize that as a contacts-wearer until i started to research lasik (i learned that wearing contacts was more likely to end up causing me vision problems than lasik, which is what convinced me to get it).

What about Lasek? Generally has less complications and less invasive, but takes more time to heal.

I am not going to risk it at this point. Both involve cutting through the epithilium to get at the cornea underneath, and in my case some of the cells that pump moisture through the epithilium were damaged or destroyed, so it's even more of a risk than for most people.

This is the _one_ thing I miss about getting my eyesight fixed. Within a month of getting laser surgery, it was so natural that I'd essentially forgotten the experience of glasses and contacts, as though I'd never experienced the previous 20 years with them.

One of my very favorite things to do before then was sit in Central Park, or at the Diversey Rocks in Chicago, or anywhere with lots of color, remove my glasses, and just enjoy the blur of it all. It was very calming. An escape from all the details around me, which immediately translated to an inner calm.

I still prefer my perfect vision, and I paid a lot more than I could afford when I had it done to make sure it was done well. But I do very much miss that old shortcut to a quick and simple calm.

Why not just buy some glasses that blur up your vision? And then go put them on in Central Park?

As a glasses-wearer who understands the parent commenter: the all-encompassing vision granted by taking off the glasses (which cover ~60% of our regular view) is what makes for the wholesome, nice feeling OP is talking about.

make sure they're rose-tinted too

You can train your eye muscles to focus at whatever distance without needing something to fixate on. This allows you to blur your vision at will simply by focusing close.

Only until presbyopia sets in, starting in your 40s and completing in the early 50s (usually).

You could force your eyes to blur and achieve the same effect.

It's easier to do if you are tired, if you've never done it before. Crossing your eyes slightly also helps (then hold the blurry focus and uncross them).

The continuous effort required to force blurring pretty much negates the calming effect, I think.

I tell people I could walk through a room of naked people and not see anything private.

Bah, my eye Rx is -8.5 diopters. Taking off my glasses/contacts doesn't "soften" the external world - it makes me unable to function. If I forget where I put my glasses after taking out my contacts at night before going to bed, I have to call my wife to find them for me. If I try moving around too much, I'm liable to hurt myself.

I'll probably want to get LASIK at some point :)

I was at that point when I had it done. The only problem with having that bad of an eyesight, they have to use the laser for longer. It helped I had extra thick corneas, but the surgeon I went to said some folks can't have the surgery with eyes that bad.

Of course, that was 15 years ago, so maybe different guidelines now.

I am -7.5 and agree w/ GP, especially for identifying SMD components and other details.

But, yes, sometimes I need help finding my glasses, too.

Both eyes worse than -6.

I use special always-on contacts since 5 years ago or so, change them once a month. This reduces the hassle a lot.

I have the same situation. When I take my glasses off and move stuff close to my eyes (really close, like around ~4cm) it's like looking through a microscope.

I wrote a huge comment in reply to someone else, but I had this "superpower", too, and wasn't told that I'd lose it after having my vision corrected. I miss it.

I do the same when I feel disillusioned with superficial beauty. Really pretentious, I know. Either way, it feels good to reduce people to blobs every once and a while. I sometimes get too distracted by looks, so being able to turn that off is nice.

You are under 40 I assume? That's not gonna last forever

Nearsightedness does not go away after 40 (presbiopia does not cancel out myopia).

I meant "viewing something as close to my nose as I comfortably can" won't last long.

People like myself with both presbiopia and myopia can still comfortably view something close to the nose (without glasses).

I don't think near sightedness means better than 20/20 up close...

Personal anecdote...depends on your age. I'm near sighted (blind as a bat since my teens) and up until I was ~45'ish still had perfect 20/20 near sight vision. Up close I could read the tiniest of print and perform tasks and repairs on very small assemblies (I'm talking sub-millimetre PCB work and modelling). As I've gotten older this has gotten harder and these sorts of tasks now demand the use of a magnifying glass. This could probably be corrected with the use of varifocal lenses but for now I get on fine with a magnifier.

Apropos the Lasik treatment, in my early 20's vanity got the better of me and I wore contact lenses for a time. There were also practicality reasons because I'm a biker and ruined several pairs of glasses trying to stuff the legs into my helmet. Anyway, I contracted an eye infection which over the period of a month affected both eyes and could have resulted in loss of sight in one eye. The doc reckoned I'd picked this up from the lenses despite me being totally anal about keeping them clean. I never wore contacts again. Despite the annoyance sometimes of having to wear eyeglasses, my eyesight even with its less than perfect capabilities, is too valuable a sense to lose. Despite all the Lasik success stories it bothered me enough that I might just be that unlucky sod it doesn't work on and could end up worse just for the sake of convenience and vanity.

It depends on the cause but if the only thing wrong is your eyes are focused to closely, then you will have better vision up close because you have better magnification from the shorter focused lens.

Heh, I do this too. It’s great after I’ve been staring at a screen for hours, although I also take my glasses off when using a computer because I really only need them For distance. I definitely feel like it helps my eyes relax a bit more to have my glasses off.