Screen addiction is a funny term that made realize that it’s the perfect term for this.
I remember in a recent city blackout, me and other people , that didn't have internet or comms, would instinctively pull out their phones and open apps knowingly that there is no connection.
Paul Graham recently: The people who still read won't just be better informed. They'll be (with a couple exceptions) the only ones who can think well. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.
Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book? Reading the news from the AP/Reuters and a book on history?
I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.
I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.
An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.
> Is there value in identifying the difference between reading a longer article like this one and an actual book?
The difference is gigantic. All the best writers and most important writers are dead and aren't posting comments on Twitter or writing articles for blogs or newspapers.
You could ask yourself similarly if there's any value in listening to any other music than what they are playing on the Top 40 radio channel.
at work we started making a libary with books we want to read to keep us sane and adopting good and old practices in the world of ai. its very easy to get blind nowdays but reading have helped me alot
Is reading morally superior? It seems like greater society (with the apps) is rapidly changing back to an oral culture which seems to be humanity’s default setting.
Interesting, I struggle to read. I always have. But I genuinely enjoyed it. Few years back I told a colleague that by the time I reach the end of paragraph I forget how it started. He told me sounds like a learning difficulty. So I did a test, thinking I was dyslexic. It turns out I have ADHD with particularly bad short term memory.
Anyways my question for everyone here, how do you read with ADHD? How do you over come reading the same passage multiple time?
I think constantly checking if you can recall the last paragraph is a bad habit. It not only requires mental effort, it also breaks your flow.
I have ADHD myself, and I advise you to always keep reading. Don't stop and think about what things meant, don't recall the important events at the end of a paragraph or chapter, none of that. Just keep reading.
If you really feel like you didn't 'get it', go back 3 chapters. But reread it without stopping.
> I hit my reading peak when I was eleven or twelve.
This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.
His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.
I found Amazon's Whispersync (audiobook + ebook synced) helpful for keeping me engaged in books in the smartphone era.
This is a plug, but I made my own epub + text to speech reader for iOS for keeping myself engaged in reading, and have been reading/listening to classics such as Crime and Punishment this way: https://heard.quest/
I deeply resonate with this. Even when I began reading, I felt myself wanting to jump away into my email or some other needless task. After getting through the premise, it felt almost like a challenge to read the entire blog. Very well done.
>> He didn’t just mean that there would be a deluge of school reading, he meant that there would be so much going on around campus that reading for fun would be a kind of admission of social failure
It’s very clear that op’s father doesn’t value education first nor does he care to provide that influence to his children.
A few months ago I spent an entire Saturday reading a long book (Underworld by Don DeLillo) deliberately with my phone off. I walked around, went to a restaurant, sat on a bench in the park, all with just the book. It was one of the most “grounded” days I’ve had in years, and I felt like I noticed dozens of things about the place I live that I hadn’t noticed before.
Ironically it was the exact day that the recent Iran war started. But I didn’t find out about it until late at night, when I turned my phone back on.
I dropped Twitter for Lent this year, just in time for the fighting to pick up. Being stuck with slow, oversimplified (and likely propagandistic) news coverage instead of the usual OSINT accounts, (likely fake) firsthand reports, and bad-but-fun hot takes was frustrating for a bit .
(I still haven't gotten back on, and I'm much happier for it)
I believe we should.. step back a bit, and agree on what we mean by "reading books", vs "other things on a screen"; you all mean the tension between reading cumulative attention-intensive material versus discontinuous context-resetting material, right?
Most people never really developed the habit of reading.
They sure did consume the newspaper but that has now been replaced with social media. The medium changed but the habits did not.
I think author is having an existential crisis instead of the world as he wrote.
The addiction of these mediums is undeniable. But let’s not lie to ourselves; only a few people liked to read. Anything that requires deep concentration often needs incentives or real consequences to make it more compelling.
The only way out of this is elimination of the medium itself.
You wouldn’t want a cocaine addict to carry a bag of cocaine in his pocket. But this is what’s happening to us all.
I feel for this author. Not because of his attention span, but rather that his whole life has been lived trying to conform to someone else's ideals. Can't read in middle or high school because of what peers would think. Couldn't read in college for what his dad said that he should be doing. Can't read in your professional life because it's 'childish'. Now he feels 'obligated' to read because it's part of Bourdieauian ideals?
I think the author should take a long hard look at himself, and decide for himself what his ideals are that he wants to live by. Reading even though you don't like it isn't evidence of sophisitication, it is evidence of stupidity.
I think this presents an opportunity to explore balance in the type of information you want and the time it takes to consume it.
I'll use podcasts as an example. I think podcasts became very popular because the host could sit with a guest for a long time and discuss important topics at depth. The problem, in my view, is that that medium locked itself into longer lengths of time that it always has to fill. I may want to hear a politician talk for 3 hours if they're running for office but I don't necessarily want to hear an actor's thoughts on life for that long (for the fifth time). Sometimes, a late night show's 5 minutes is sufficient for the latter.
Does every Substack have to include an SEO-esque preamble before it gets to the ultimate point it's trying to make or perspective it's trying to explore? I think, in an ideal situation, the format (including length) of the article/book/etc. would match the reader's capacity and willingness to read it.
One last note - just because I read it somewhere and it stuck with me - "Learning is an intelligent person's favorite form of procrastination." So if you're consuming whatever you're consuming and you feel like it's not just social media-like consumption in a different form, then more power to you.
24 comments
[ 624 ms ] story [ 1261 ms ] threadI know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff
I remember in a recent city blackout, me and other people , that didn't have internet or comms, would instinctively pull out their phones and open apps knowingly that there is no connection.
I wonder what’s this about??
https://x.com/paulg/status/2075980847228801132
I spend lots of time online, primarily on my phone, reading. I don’t watch videos and I don’t use social media aside from browsing the Reddit front page. I try to justify my online escapes because I’m reading a substack, a bit of news, an interesting HN link about someone’s project.
I know I’m fooling myself. Closing the door on the internet and opening a page on an ereader or a physical book is absolutely a different activity. While the content of the book is important (and hopefully well written and captivating!) I regard it now with the added benefit of exercising my attention span.
An interesting book I read called Peak Mind makes the simple point that your life consists of what you pay attention to. Since then I’ve been trying (and failing, and trying) to be more conscious of where I spend my attention and how I can strengthen it against the well researched and incredibly effective distraction engines in my daily life.
The difference is gigantic. All the best writers and most important writers are dead and aren't posting comments on Twitter or writing articles for blogs or newspapers.
You could ask yourself similarly if there's any value in listening to any other music than what they are playing on the Top 40 radio channel.
Edit - via the visual boost of short form video
I have ADHD myself, and I advise you to always keep reading. Don't stop and think about what things meant, don't recall the important events at the end of a paragraph or chapter, none of that. Just keep reading.
If you really feel like you didn't 'get it', go back 3 chapters. But reread it without stopping.
This has long been the way. Mortimer Adler pointed out in the 70s (at the latest) that reading instruction (ie how to extract meaning from marks on a page) doesn’t really advance after 6th grade. After that we still give kids harder things to read, but scarcely provide them with strategies.
His How to read a book was an attempt at filling in the gap. It’s one of my favorite books.
It’s very clear that op’s father doesn’t value education first nor does he care to provide that influence to his children.
Such a sad situation.
Ironically it was the exact day that the recent Iran war started. But I didn’t find out about it until late at night, when I turned my phone back on.
(I still haven't gotten back on, and I'm much happier for it)
They sure did consume the newspaper but that has now been replaced with social media. The medium changed but the habits did not.
I think author is having an existential crisis instead of the world as he wrote.
The addiction of these mediums is undeniable. But let’s not lie to ourselves; only a few people liked to read. Anything that requires deep concentration often needs incentives or real consequences to make it more compelling.
The only way out of this is elimination of the medium itself.
You wouldn’t want a cocaine addict to carry a bag of cocaine in his pocket. But this is what’s happening to us all.
It’s interesting how ruling out those options of spending my time made me default to reading more.
I also noticed I had a much better attention span for long-form movies (2+ hours used to be hard for paying attention to one thing).
I think the author should take a long hard look at himself, and decide for himself what his ideals are that he wants to live by. Reading even though you don't like it isn't evidence of sophisitication, it is evidence of stupidity.
I'll use podcasts as an example. I think podcasts became very popular because the host could sit with a guest for a long time and discuss important topics at depth. The problem, in my view, is that that medium locked itself into longer lengths of time that it always has to fill. I may want to hear a politician talk for 3 hours if they're running for office but I don't necessarily want to hear an actor's thoughts on life for that long (for the fifth time). Sometimes, a late night show's 5 minutes is sufficient for the latter.
Does every Substack have to include an SEO-esque preamble before it gets to the ultimate point it's trying to make or perspective it's trying to explore? I think, in an ideal situation, the format (including length) of the article/book/etc. would match the reader's capacity and willingness to read it.
One last note - just because I read it somewhere and it stuck with me - "Learning is an intelligent person's favorite form of procrastination." So if you're consuming whatever you're consuming and you feel like it's not just social media-like consumption in a different form, then more power to you.