No Stupid Questions

Well, you've got some iffy assumptions in place, but that's whatever.

When it comes to lighting, in home, you're limited by the home itself unless you have the ability/finances to change things at a useful scale.

So, older homes tend to have older lighting installations. Back in the day, the big thing was fluorescent lighting. Some compact, some the full on tubes and rings. A lot of old folks now are just sticking with what was the dominant technology at the time they had the ability to pick how they lit their homes, or bought them.

Since vision does weaken over a lifetime, more intense lighting is helpful.

Here's the thing though. Back in the day, I always wondered why so many old folks had such dim and poorly spread lighting. It was the same reason. Their homes were structured around incandescent bulbs and lamps. So there was little choice in spectrum, and your light sources weren't going to fill the space well.

Right now, LED lighting and better spreads are the norm for new installs and remodeling. And folks are more willing to shell out for expensive bulbs that allow for changing the spectrum, so you'll run into that as the default for old folks here in maybe twenty years.

My house is old as fuck. Built back before anyone currently alive had been born yet. Then partially rebuilt in the seventies, with a partial remodel in the late nineties.

You can tell by walking through the house what lighting was popular at the times involved because the oldest parts have a single fixture in the center of the ceiling, and fuck you if you want a better layout lol. The seventies era bits have some retrofit fluorescent fixtures that are essentially just a different spectrum with similar placements.

But the nineties era parts are better lit, with fixtures placed to give an even light with less/no harsh spots.

Now, I've replaced the incandescent bulbs with LEDs, and they had been compact fluorescent bulbs before that. But there's no way in hell I would spend the amount of money it would take to light the house better on lighting. There's other shit way higher in priority when I can just screw in a higher power bulb and see okay. And, once "old" turns into old, as in stuck on social security/pension fixed income old, remodels tend not to be a useful outlay for lighting. You'd be going after bathroom and kitchen accessibility fixes instead.

I had to replace the fixture in the kitchen maybe two years ago, the old one having aged into decrepitude beyond the ability to cut on. I barely got the job done. So, fixed income and unable to do the work one's self means shit just stays as it is. I would have loved to put in better fixtures, better quality lighting, but all I could manage was a new thing to screw a bulb into. And I'm only "old", not old. Middle aged still, but with limitations akin to that of proper senior citizens.

For real, if this house had been updated twenty years ago, we'd have likely been plopping in big fluorescents overhead too, like was the default at that time.