I'm nearsighted with simple myopia and most of my life I've used contacts for distance vision. I never had any problems reading close up with my contacts in. Then I turned 50, and within a year, I suddenly needed to use either reading glasses with my contacts or bifocal glasses in order to both see long distance and use a computer or my phone.

It wasn't a slow decline. One day my eyes worked like they had for my entire life, and the next my eyes went wonky. Getting older sucks! Without glasses, I can still read books and my phone just fine. I've just lost my "middle vision" of about an arm's length away.

Anyways, all my fifty-something peers are going through the same thing. It's a really inconvenient life change. I imagine something like this would be popular if it were more well known. My optometrist didn't say anything at all about it.

Side note: Laser surgery can only fix one type of vision problem. So if I were to go in to fix my myopia, I'd still have presbyopia (age related hyperopia), or vice versa. There doesn't seem to be a one-size-fits-all surgery for vision.

A similar thing happened to me in my mid-40s. I had been fortunate to have "perfect" vision until suddenly I was complaining about the tiny fonts on labels and started struggling doing small wiring tasks. It wasn't a surprise really, my mother had the best vision in my family and she eventually needed reading glasses. But how suddenly it came on surprised me, although maybe I had actually been compensating all along until I couldn't anymore.