Day: September 10, 2025

Dependency on heroin is often said to be a bad thing. After all, you are a relying on a chemical to live not unlike the use of statins to keep people alive with high levels of bad cholesterol or wearing contact lens to see. However, the later too things don’t have the same level of stigma attached to them, mostly because statins and contacts lens haven’t been defined by society as illegal even though they are very much a dependency. I mean, what is alternative? Death and blindness.

For most people, heorin addiction and use of statins can be avoided by care with pain killers and generally living a healthy lifestyle and eating primarily unprocessed foods and not too much meat. You really don’t want to be addicted or rely on either one of those things if you can avoid it. It really helps to develop a taste for things that aren’t loaded with sugars, salt and fat as much of the widely advertised processed foods are. If it’s good for your burn barrel, it’s bad for your health.

Truth there isn’t much of a way to protect your vision from becoming far-sighted beyond spending a lot of time outdoors. I did a fair bit growing up in country building trails and playing in creek, but I also admit I was a computer geek in the 1990s and also spent too much time indoors, playing around with Mac OS and Linux. Exposure to the outdoors and natural amounts of UV light is so important to protecting young people’s vision. In that way I feel I wish I had spent more time outdoors and less in front of a computer as a youth. Despite what was the meme at the time, just because you spend a lot of time working with computers doesn’t make you a programmer or necessarily particularly good with them.

Statins are tough, you can’t just wean yourself off them though good diet helps. Fortunately I don’t need them and hopefully never will. But what about vision? Well thanks to technology, it’s quite possible to get your vision permanently corrected, thanks to LASIK surgery. It’s not cheap – around $5,000 – but it’s one of the few things that you can buy for $5k that won’t end up in the scrap yard and ultimately the landfill in a few years. Vision correction is permanent, a lifetime investment free of required doctors visits and buying more plastic things to stick in your eyes and those stupid aluminum-topped packages you’ re always picking out of the fire pits.

Really, maintaining your health is important. As is fixing issues in your life permanently at least when you can. As permanence is rare, and when you make a long-range investment it is worth it.