After World War II, something strange began happening to the Inuit people of Barrow, Alaska.
Their children were becoming nearsighted — at an alarming rate.
For generations, myopia had been almost nonexistent among the Inuit. Parents and grandparents with near-perfect vision were suddenly having children who needed glasses to read the chalkboard in school.
By the 1960s, the growing difference between generations had become impossible to ignore.
That’s around the time an optometry researcher named Francis A. Young decided to study Inuit families in Barrow.
Young and his team examined 508 people, including 41 families spanning multiple generations. In 1969, their findings were published in the American Journal of Optometry.
The numbers were staggering.
Among the older Inuit, myopia had affected only a tiny fraction of the population. But among their children, it had climbed to well over 50 percent.
In a single generation, nearsightedness had gone from extremely rare to increasingly normal.
That presented researchers with a mystery. Evolution doesn’t work that quickly. Their genes hadn’t changed.
Something else must have.
But what?
In the years after World War II, life in Barrow had undergone a dramatic transformation. Children who once spent much of their time outdoors hunting, fishing, and looking across vast distances were now spending their days inside classrooms.
They were reading books, writing, and studying at their desks, focusing for hours on things directly in front of them.
For the first time, an entire generation of Inuit children was growing up in a visual environment profoundly different from the one their parents and grandparents had known.
And their eyes, it seemed, were changing with it.
By the time Young published his findings, there was no way to give those children their old eyesight back. More time outdoors can help prevent myopia from developing, but once a child is already nearsighted, the change is usually permanent.
So Barrow’s parents did what parents of nearsighted children still do today.
They got their children glasses.
The school year continued and the children kept reading and writing. Each new pair of glasses allowed a child to continue participating in the very environment that had made those glasses necessary.
Nothing about this struck me as strange at first.
I knew the story well. I had lived it.
Thirty years later and thousands of miles away, the same thing happened to me.
In third grade, I started squinting at the board. My teacher moved me closer, which worked for a while. Then I started squinting again, so she moved me closer again.
Eventually I was sitting in the first row and still having trouble seeing.
So my parents got me glasses.
For years, I only needed them in class. But my eyesight kept getting worse. By seventh grade, I needed to wear them all the time.
At no point did anyone seem to think this was odd. We kept going to the optometrist, and he kept adjusting my prescription.
My parents assumed bad eyesight ran somewhere in the family. So did I.
We had no idea that how I was living — or the environment I was living in — might’ve had anything to do with it.
Learning about the Inuit made me wonder what else I’d spent years trying to fix about myself without ever questioning the environment around me.
For most of my adult life, I’ve thought I could be in better shape. A little leaner. A little more muscular. I figured the answer was exercise.
The problem was most of my day had been designed for the opposite. As a software engineer, I would sit for hours. Drive instead of walk. Almost every physical inconvenience previous generations had to endure had been engineered out of my life.
After work, my phone would tell me I hadn’t moved enough, so I’d get back in my car and drive somewhere to go exercise.
It’s hilarious if you think about it. We spent generations removing movement from daily life, and now have to block out time to put it back.
Our food is even worse.
We made calories cheaper, more convenient, tastier, and harder to resist. Then, as people became heavier, an entire sister industry emerged to help us eat less of the food the first one was making us eat more of.
Diet books. Weight-loss programs. Appetite suppressants. And now injectable peptides to quiet hunger itself.
One industry gets better at making us eat. Another gets better at helping us stop.
And somewhere between the two, we assume the thing that needs fixing is us.
This is how it's gone for thousands of years. We change the conditions of human life and then invent new ways to help ourselves function inside whatever side effects those environments produce.
We’ve become frighteningly good at it.
So good that the fix usually causes us to forget what caused the issue in the first place.
Maybe that’s starting to change. Ideas that once sounded radical are becoming mainstream.
Do we really need to spend 40 hours a week in an office?
Why are children spending so much time in front of screens and so little time outside?
Why has eating healthy become something that requires constant vigilance?
The Internet has helped us begin to question many of these issues. Once people started sharing their stories, what many assumed was their own inability to cope started to look more like a reasonable response to an unreasonable environment.
Which I find encouraging.
For most of my life, when something wasn’t working, my instinct was to ask what I needed to change about myself.
Now I ask another question first:
What made this fix necessary?
Sometimes I’ll still choose the glasses.
But not before taking a look around the room.