Congrats on the luck

Then you were likely genetically predetermined to be at least a little myopic, but if you spent less time outside during your developmental phases you would likely be even more nearsighted than you are now.

N=1

"Reduces chances" does not mean "prevents"

We spent so much time outside we developed near sightedness instead

You should have “spend” the day outdoors not “spent”.

You need to read better. It says it reduces occurrence of myopia in a population not that it cures myopia when an individual gets it.

Sure if you have very mild short term myopia caused by eye straining you can get vision back by training your eye. But with kids it’s about how the eye develops when it’s still growing. When kids eyes grow too fast they grow less spherical and that is what causes myopia and that is the kind that you can never cure. Going outside means kids are getting more sunlight in their eye which will slow down the growth and thus their eyes will grow more spherical which means they don’t develop myopia. Playing outside won’t cure myopia but it will reduce the chance of developing it in children.

Yes, I spent 6 months in ICU in 2014, I had a lot of eye issues while I was there not related to my reason for my stay (bilateral lung transplant) but as side effects of procedures and meds but I also basically lost my depth perception unless it was directly in front of me. Living in a 10x10 room for half a year with no far away distances to observe made my eyes weak, it took about six months after I got home to get my full depth prescription back. Indoors just makes your eyes weak, mine is an extreme example, but it doesn’t permanently ruin them.

If this is just a correlation this would have to be a correlation at the population level. Countries where kids start school later on (e.g. 7 years old) have significantly lower rates of myopia than countries that start school early on in a child's development (e.g. 3 years old). It's still possible that this is a correlation, but the correlation would have to be capturing something deeper than just an individual kids screen time. Granted, this correlation would still need to account for differences between individual kids, but it would also need to account for differences between kids at a population level. It's hard to see what could be causing this correlation though. So maybe there's something there we're just not seeing, but at a certain point though the idea that there is a causal relationship starts to seem like the most plausible explanation for explaining this data

It wasn't mentioned in this article, but I remember reading somewhere that it might be because exposure to sunlight affects vitamin D production, which affects the length/shape of our eyeballs as we're growing up.

if you want sad but unfortunate proof, read about the case of genie. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_%28feral_child%29?wprov=sfla1

the relevant bit here is that when she was taken out of the room she was kept in till age 13, her eyes were literally unable to focus on anything more than 10 feet away (as that was the size of the room she was kept in). imo that shows that being outside where objects tend to be farther away at a young age helps train your eyes to do so in the future.

You might have had a higher degree of myopia if you hadn't spent all that time outdoors.

You can establish causation even if you don't know what the mechanism is. I don't know to what extent causation has been established here though, I'm not familiar enough with the research. But at minimum the intuitive idea that there is a noncausative correlation because kids with bad eyesight choose to stay inside more does not seem to stand, since this phenomenon can exist at a population level (so countries where schools start younger - and kids go outside less - have significantly higher rates of myopia).

That depends entirely on how the correlation is determined. For example randomized control trials can establish causal inference.

Yeah that was a typo. Edited the title to fix it, should be correct now

But this also kind of feels to me like something that could go the other way- myopic kids are less likely to go outside

It's not just individual kids they are measuring, but entire populations of children and at what age they start school. The younger kids are when they start school, the more likely they are to be myopic, and this contributes to significant differences in the prevalence in myopia across countries (Edit: I should have stated this explicitly, but this is because more time in school means less time outside, generally speaking)