At the Brink Yet Again

I fell out of my one photo every day project for a bit. I'm having difficulty with my eyes being in pain and not focusing readily, which makes me just shy of miserable much of the time. Computer vision syndrome is a bother. I'm trying to cut back on screen time as I'm reasonably convinced that will help. It always has in the past. Cutting back on screen time means working on photos less.

I'd like to lament that my profession makes it impractical to reduce my screen time to genuinely healthy levels, which is true, but honestly, I'm just as likely to spend several hours after work doomscrolling and watching various genres of videos on my laptop or phone, while simultaneously watching different genres of videos on my television, because everyone does that now, but I'm cutting back on it. I'm also taking Xiidra again, using OTC artificial tears, running a humidifier at all times, using heat packs on my eyes, cleaning my eyelashes daily with a special spritz, experimenting with different prescription strengths for glasses, using a larger 4K monitor zoomed-in, blinking deliberately, taking frequent breaks to rest my vision, and trying to log off the machines when I don't have a specific reason to be on a computer.

The problem is there's always a pretense to be on a computer because that's where everything and everyone is now. And it's not like I can fall back to reading a book or painting or anything else that requires foveal vision. It's the closeup, detail work that's busting my balls — eyeballs, that is. I go for walks, but it's cold, and there's nowhere to go because of the plague, so the walks are of the shorter variety. I would love to haunt a local bar or two, but they're full of the kinds of people who hang out in bars during an airborne pandemic. I miss cafes full of strangers and their all too often awful conversations, but they're full of people from the bar too.

My eyes will probably recover with time. They always have so far. And society will get back to something like normal in not too long. That is if these foolish old criminals don't drag us into a nuclear apocalypse over old grudges and petrochemical grifts. I guess we'll see.