It's a generational thing. My relatives lived through the depression too and many of them live in relative darkness and some still turn out lights as though the light police is watching.

However, I was taught all about light and the eyes. Every wave form of light carries data. If you want to preserve your eyesight you use not just enough light to read - but MORE than enough light. That extra light carries data to the rods and cones and they don't have to work so hard to focus. The resulting relaxation on the lens an lens muscles around the eyeball give eyes a longer shelf life. I'm still glasses free and well into middle age. I can thank my 4th grade health teacher for that one. She made all that perfectly clear. She also brought in a model lung and taught all about alveoli preservation and I thank her for that as well.

The depression is over. I see lots of folks still switching off lights and living in darkness. Not surprisingly many of these folks and their kids also need glasses to read. How many people really understand what happens to their eyes when they read? How many know that fluorescents contain mercury and know what mercury does to the nervous system? We live in a world where the absence of information results in all sorts of choices.

My choices make sense to me as everyone else's make sense to them. But now I find my freedom of choice is going to be curtailed and most folks wont mind - because they don't make decisions based on the same dataset.

And another FYI...two 100 watts dont equal the light of one 200 bulb. The amplitude of electricity in the higher resistor produces light that is far more efficient in the 200 watt and because of this you get a DIFFERENT TYPE of light than you could even get out of a whole bunch of 100 watts put together. The light has a higher frequency.

So one 200 watt standing lamp, contrary to popular belief, is actually more efficient lighting than three or four small 100 watt lamps in the same room or the same fixture. Try this at home. Put a 200 watt in a bathroom fixture by itself and then put in two or 3 100 watts or four 60 watts. Four 25 watt watt bulbs put out the fraction of light a 100 watt bulb produces.

This is why I lament the increasing absence of the 200 watt bulb. It's served me well for decades now.

There is a science to lighting, just as everything else. Information. It is the source of all sorts of decisions and helps them to make sense.