Illuminating thoughts on how to adapt the world to aging eyeballs
It turns out people in their 60s need three times more light for easy reading than folks in their 20s
High school English, and Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night” opens with ’Rage, rage against the dying of the light.’ Ah, what a metaphor for life!
But in the space between teen angst and OAS, I’ve found that light does indeed start to die around me.
Task lighting is my new best friend. The ceiling light can be on full blast, but if I’m to read the document in front of me, a 60W beam of nearby helpfulness is needed.
The eye doctors had always told me that as I got older I would likely need reading glasses (check!) and possibly encounter cataracts along the way. Fair enough. But somehow I missed the memo about needing more light for comfortable reading.
But it turns out people in their 60s need three times more light for easy reading than folks in their 20s.
“The passage of time can weaken the tiny muscles that control your eye’s pupil size,” says the National Institutes of Health. “The pupil becomes smaller and less responsive to changes in light.”
This in turn can lead to trouble seeing at night and the loss of some peripheral vision. Hence the decision by some older friends to stop driving in the dark or low light situations.
LED lights have made a world of difference to me. I didn’t realize when they first started becoming A Thing 20 years ago that Light Emitting Diode light bulbs would make my life easier one day.
Some of you might recall that the early LEDs were fiendishly expensive and put out an ugly-white light. (At least LED bulbs are not considered hazardous waste when it comes time to dispose of them, unlike compact fluorescent bulbs.) But for folks wanting to cut back on power costs, LEDs were a good solution at the time.
Fast forward to 2025 and incandescent bulbs are now vastly outnumbered by LED bulbs on the store shelves. Prices, shapes, colour-spectrums and a proven longer lifespan have all changed for the better.
I don’t know why it took so long before the metaphorical light bulb came on for me, but it was a good day when I realized I could screw a 100W equivalent LED bulb into a 60W incandescent fixture and not create a fire hazard. My task lighting was now more than able to do the jobs asked of it.
And when dimmable LED bulbs came along, I could adjust my kitchen track lights from super bright (for food prep) to somewhat dim (for mood lighting) with ease. I know that I have enough light to do surgery on my main kitchen counter now, but is that really a bad thing?
The switch to LED bulbs at my home workstation did not please my cat, however. Gone was the nice warmth generated by the incandescent bulb, forcing him to sit much closer to heat-generating me – and ideally in my line of sight to the monitor.
I found out the hard way that my “adequate” light levels can be much too bright for younger folks. When I house-sat for a friend, I helpfully swapped out her single 60W incandescent bulb in her kitchen for two 100 W LEDs. She said it was like being beamed up by aliens when she turned on her kitchen light when she got home.
I now appreciate there is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to lighting intensity and location, as personal choices can be dictated by health circumstances not visible to the naked eye.
But I do wonder about the choices made by the designers featured in various home décor magazines. Perhaps less is more in the design world when it comes to kitchen and work room lighting, but for the folks who have to live and work in those one-designer-light-fixture spaces I’m sure they’ll find that one day more is better!
Is there any way to stop the dimming of my world? No, say the experts, but I might be able to slow it with healthy behaviours, such as not smoking, eating a nutritious diet and controlling any chronic conditions I may have.
Best instead to keep a “watching brief” with regular appointments at the optometrist to make sure no other eye problems are creeping in.
So metaphors for light have taken on more meaning for me now. I’ve learned to value it and to live without it when I have to (no more reading in low light!)
Said Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
Thanks to LEDs, I’ve learned that I can crack open the status quo of lighting, making changes to create a system that works for me. And now when I run into problems, I look for the solutions – because more light on a situation is both a metaphor and a reality.
