I have decided to start a small series of blog posts about irrational things people say or do. These aren’t particularly problematic things, just oddities I’ve noticed over time and never really understood. The first one is when people wear sunglasses.
It seems like temperature is equally as important (if not more important) in determining whether someone wears sunglasses as how bright it is outside. This makes no sense when you consider that the entire point of sunglasses is to dim down bright light and they have no body-cooling functionality. Regardless, I more often see people wearing sunglasses on overcast summer days than on sunny winter days. This is made even more ridiculous when you realize that a sunny day with fresh snow on the ground is actually the brightest kind of day there is – and yet most people won’t wear sunglasses on those days. To highlight the ridiculous nature of this tendency, I will tell a true story that happened to me not too long ago:
I was walking to class on a sub-freezing Ithaca winter’s day. As the one who would go on to write this post, I naturally was one of the few wearing sunglasses. I encountered a sunglasses-less friend along the way and had to call her name for her to see me. This is because she was looking straight down since the sun and its reflection off the snow were too bright to gaze into. She then looked up, barely able to open her eyes, a look of pain on her face from the sunlight, and asked, “Why are you wearing sunglasses?”
Why am I wearing sunglasses?!
I kid you not, this has happened to me not once, but twice, and both times I was dumbfounded. These people are visibly wincing at the pain of opening their eyes, and the first thing they ask me is why I am wearing sunglasses. This suggests that, for some people, the tendency is even worse than simply not thinking to put on sunglasses when it’s cold – some people actually live in denial of the fact that it’s bright outside simply because it’s cold.
I have yet to hear anyone give me a good explanation of why people do this, but I would love to hear one, if it even exists.
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