comment: >
  
  From back in the day, glasses also where relatively expensive. The poors who didn't need to read, just got along with less than perfect eye-sight just fine. Also, spending long hours reading was symbolized with loosing eyesight early. If you have something like 25/20 or 30/20, or even 40/20 vision, you can be a farmer or laborer just fine without glasses
  So, nearsighted glasses where more of a symbol for someone who spends a large portion of their day reading and writing fine text on paper, where that was not something most people would do, at all. So glasses would be symbolic of that trade.
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  Probably have it’s origin in the olden days when glasses were mostly used for reading and reading was mostly done by the educated and education wasn’t for everyone.
  During the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia in the 70s they executed people with glasses as they were suspected intellectuals. >
  
  Ole’ Pol Pot, completed fucked a country, killed millions and got away with it. >
  
  Isn’t there a comedian who asks in one of his standups “why didn’t they simply take the glasses off when he was coming”? >
  
  The obvious punchline: They wouldn't have seen them coming. >
  
  Hey dude, if I have to live with glasses my whole life can I at least look smart for it >
  
  Yeah, thanks OP now I get to feel defective and dumb for the rest of the day. >
  
  A defect one is motivated to transcend in order to read and learn more. >
  
  Disagree >
  
  Good talk. Got a lot out of your comment. >
  
  Agree >
  
  My man is verbally upvoting >
  
  Neither agree nor disagree >
  
  Reading is actually a causative factor in humans needing glasses. Not the only one, but a big external one. The strain over time of making your eyes focus on small writing or print eventually causes short-sightedness as your eyes attempt to adapt to this weird thing you are doing. Evolution didn’t give us eyes designed for reading. 
  Therefore, once glasses were invented to correct this, if you needed them, it was likely that you read a lot. If you read a lot, you were probably smart and didn’t need to spend all day in the fields, obviously. So wearing glasses became associated with intelligence and elevated social standing. 
  While less true today, the association remains. >
  
  I wonder how this holds today with increased dependence on screen time for both work and play. >
  
  I think I recall that spending more time focusing close distances can make your eyesight worse at seeing far away. Don't quote me on this -- I'm going to be lazy and not look it up right now. Anyhow, if this is true, reading and using computers might impact people's eyesight. Nowadays, though, what people closely focus on the most is their phone, which might not have the most intelligent stuff on the screen most of the time. >
  
  There's some stuff out there that hints to it, but some places say there's no correlation nowadays? It's not a clear conclusion, but it's definitely not KNOWN to not be correlated either.
  My optometrist tends to tell me to avoid computers and reading (and I do notice that my eyesight gets temporarily worse than my normal after a long reading session). But the thing is, in the last 4 years since my previous prescription I got a new one that is close enough that I was recommended to keep my glasses. Had to switch them anyway like a month later because the glasses frame broke (moved the lenses to another frame) >
  
  In my case, my eyesight started going bad when I was young (maybe around 9?) and quickly got worse until I was maybe in my late teens or early 20s then it leveled off. My eyesight hasn't changed much in the last 15 years. >
  
  Mine would change rapidly year to year since I was a kid. Between 18 and 19 mine went up like 2 whole points in each eye. Getting those new glasses was awful to get used to. But now I'm 24 and I just got new glasses after 3 years and both eyes barely went up 2 clicks each. My doctor said I should level off within the next year or so