I’m near-sighted and I have astigmatism.

So I wear contact lenses to help me see things far away, and my eyeballs have “rotational asymmetry,” which in this context means they’re kind of pointy in the front, like a football.

There’s a special type of lens (toric) that can rest atop pointy eyes like a road cone slipped onto another road cone, and they rotate to account for the weirdness in vision created by that bizarre shape.

I love my contacts, but for a long time I had trouble with blurriness after putting them on, and sometimes this distorted vision would last all morning. I attributed this to eye dryness and just assumed everyone wearing torics dealt with the same issue, but a few years after getting them, I found out I was wrong.

Toric lenses have a bit of ballasting: a little weight that pulls downward to keep them rotated in proper alignment.

This weight is just a tiny line that you can see if you squint, and I had always assumed said line was a manufacturing artifact, not a functional element of the product. But if you take a quick moment to ensure this line is on the bottom of the lens when you put it in, it works perfectly from the get-go, no on-eye rotation (which sometimes takes all morning) required.

I bring this up because I only learned about this little design element from an online message board (reddit). These sorts of platforms are rapidly replacing search engines and social networks as hubs for finding (at least semi-reliable) information about random things, as they are (currently, at least) less saturated by AI-generated slop and algorithmically prioritized nonsense.

It’s ridiculous that these sorts of online communities are becoming more reliable than other options, but that’s where we are right now. Most such resources (except Wikipedia and a few others) have been rendered substantially less valuable by the economic (and in some cases, cultural) priorities of their owners.

Many contact-wearing people will have been told about the lines on their torics by whomever gave them their lens prescription, but those of us who don’t receive such information via traditional sources for whatever reason are increasingly reliant on knowledge shared via these increasingly noisy mediums.

There’s still a lot of value out there, and none of these things are 100% devoid of utility. But it looks like we’re entering a period (hopefully a short one) during which the communication of information will become more difficult.

Which already sucks, but this becomes even more of an issue long-term, as generational knowledge requires we have consistent, resilient sources of understanding and know-how, lest we someday forget how to keep the lights on, and how folks with blurry vision might be able to remedy their situation.

I don’t know what we do about this. I wish I did, because I derive immense pleasure and value from online resources, and it feels like the big ones have been built on unstable foundations, while the scrappier ones are too small to act as Schelling Points, (currently) incapable of attracting enough people who will share and learn.

I’m sure we’ll eventually figure something out, and as individuals we can tend our own gardens, tweak the settings on our megaphones, and do our best to support the versions of these things we want to see succeed (while depleting the opposite).

In the meantime, though, we may have to muddle through a world that’s a bit blurrier than what we’ve become accustomed to, fumbling and stumbling until we find the right counter-ballast.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.