Still... I have never really felt comfortable being dependant on something to get by.
I pretty much developed a full on phobia of medical drugs for fear of developing a dependency, and now being told that I will need glasses seems sort of scary. I'm very much a 'carry your house on your back' kind of guy, and that becomes more and more difficult the more things become indisposable.
Well, you don't
need them in a technical sense. You can go functionally blind just fine, it'll just mean becoming pretty much non-functional in a lot of ways. 40's a good age to shoot for you're looking to go without all those delightful dependency-related advances the human race has made in the last few hundred years, really.
I've got that near-phobia of drugs, too, but glasses don't elicit nearly the same response from me. I can take glasses off really easily, after all. Be basically useless, yes, but there's not a direct physiological dependency of any sort. They're just a tool, like a magnifying glass.
Started wearing them I think around 17-18 years ago, though, which probably has something to do with it. Also helps that not wearing them and attempting to function (read: Read or identify any details beyond that foot or so) is accompanied by crippling headaches. Having to choose between a painkiller dependency or glasses is a really easy choice
God dammit, I have the eyesight of an old man...
Better than the spine or the nervous system of one
And not really. Plenty of old men can see just fine, same as plenty of young ones have trouble seeing. I've had functional vision problems since I was in the single digit year range and I know people in their 80s that don't have a single issue. It's just a thing, yanno'?