Letting go of the idea of keeping up
reactormag.com
reactormag.com
Granted the problem seems similar, but only because the author is in the field of reading (working in books related profession).
I'm not sure how much it can be applied to just hobby reading. Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers) but there's not much of stress if you're in it as a leisure /hobby; it's not inherently competitive activity.
So the conclusion is not that helpful. It's targeted to a very small audience (people that work in a field where reading books and keeping up with the latest books, are important) and is essentially "don't worry about it!"
Isn't the conclusion from the article inherently transferable to what you described? (I was assuming a different topic as well.)
It is helpful to people that are not aware of the source of the stress (often in the form of feeling overwhelmed) to be able to identify it. The article spend most of the words actually just describing this phenomenon. I think newly-graduated-in-tech-startup me in the past would've felt validated reading it.
But the article falls short on any good remedies for the situation. Like yeah I'd love to be able to just "not worry about it", but the problem is that I (as a researcher needing to keep up) can't just stop worrying about it, but I'd love to find a balance where I can keep the enthusiasm and up to date while not feeling overwhelmed and dreadful while doing it.
It works for the author because ultimately, the author is in a position when they can walk away or explain WHY they don't keep up and get accepted for it. Worst case the author will lose respect or some snobbish friends.
That's not the case for most tech or research people. Not worrying about it might be close to just quitting (or silent quitting) and require a bit more mental change than "to not just worry about it". Even if that's the ultimate goal, the advice is as helpful as telling a homeless man how dreadful it is to not have a home, and then tell him to just buy a house.
I understand the sentiment and I know where you're coming from with this.
Still, if you want to be less stressed, the only solution that I have found is to just not stress over things. The moment you deeply believe that only stress will improve your life situation, you have made a decision for it to be so. This is the mechanism by which the stress then proliferates not only in you, but also to others. And you don't even get a guarantee that it's worth it. You may end up with only stress and all the goals you tried to achieve with it falling apart anyway. I don't think it's worth it. One needs to find a balance.
I'm right now not in that mental state, and in matter of fact in the process of quitting my job (well one reason of it) for the stress of keeping up. So the description in your last paragraph does ring true to my previous mentality, and something I had to work on for the past 4 years to correct.
Still, when I see my newer coworkers in similar situation as I were, I know neither my experience nor your comment will reach them. But I believe your comment & my experience is probably more useful than the original articles (non-existent) advice.
Yes and that's ok. Everyone needs a different amount of suffering to get to a point where change becomes possible.
> Stress of keeping up with tech/research comes from a sense of professional obligations (you'll fall behind to your professional peers)
Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I have built my life around me with people that perform at those levels, so everyone from my wife to my best friends may disappear if I'm not performing at those levels. Not to mention, look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
So I work always, every success opens up 2 new problems to deal with.
I was happier drinking Stoic koolaid.
Excuse me, what the flask. You don't have a wife and friends then at all. You've built a non-profit organization, not a family.
> look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer
What kind of nature are you even watching? It's the sickly bottom 1% that's suffering which is an unfortunate reality, not the 90%. You completely inverted that.
Not only that, members of the same intelligent species usually help weaker members of their "packs". And people are supposed to be even better than that.
:( Yeah I know
>What kind of nature are you even watching
From the highest levels to the lowest levels, power dynamics decide how things are. I will admit that you can intellectual insanity your way to enjoying/handling suffering, I was a Stoic for 3 years. Whatever the case, maybe I've personally experienced more of this power dynamic problem. Its literally traumatic.
Even granting this premise, which I don't, the interpretation you are operating under -- all but the 1% or 10% or whatever get get crushed -- is not realistic. Folks live happy, contented lives today in community with others. Many species other than human care for the elderly or their sick and long-term disabled. Keeping with the evolutionary model why would altruism continually evolve into species without utility?
I guess, on a personal note, I hope things improve for you.
fwiw - a lot of go-getters find themselves surprised with the support and love they continue to receive from their spouse and friends when they are going through a rough patch.
I suspect you are exaggerating things in your head though. How will your wife or friends even know that you are only a 75th percentile coder (or whatever your profession is) and not a 99th percentile one? They don't, and can't, and you need to do whatever work is necessary to understand that their love for you is not actually conditional on working 90 hours a week or staying up to date on "the literature".
> Okay, I'm literally terrified about not being in the top 1% or top 10% of everything I do. Scared.
I'm not a doctor of any kind, so this isn't medical advice but: I've dealt with similar fear (usually I get scared of being in the bottom percentiles of whatever I'm doing rather than not being in the top, but the idea is the same), and IMO this feeling is enough to talk to a psychiatrist or therapist, because it is classic anxiety disorder thinking. If you really feel this way all the time (rather than just occasionally, which is pretty normal IMO -- our society tends to over-pathologize stuff like this) then talk therapy or an SSRI might help. Even if you don't think you are "crazy" or have any kind of disorder at all, talk therapy alone can improve your life dramatically. It has mine.
I think it's fairly common among top performers.
You also probably need to take a philosophical "Leap of Faith" at some point to justify your work. The obvious one is Solipsism, you basically must assume that other people have consciousness. Hope you aren't just a brain in the vat, and this worldly experience was all for you.
Stoicism is largely about accepting things as they are and letting go of the illusion of control. This, if truly integrated in your outlook, is the opposite of mental gymnastics. Said otherwise, you'd have self-awareness to understand your predicament and cut through it. Believe or not, you and Marcus Aurelius share the fundamental human condition, despite him being what you'd consider a "top performer".
Would you consider Cognitive Behavioral Therapy a practice of mental gymnastics? After all, Aaron Beck was inspired in part by the stoics.
I wish you find peace, don't be too hard on yourself.
I think it absolutely can be. A lot of negative circumstances can generate from outside ourselves and they can have massive negative effects on our mental health. Trying to use CBT to work on anxiety or depression that is caused from compounding external factors is a bit like self gaslighting
Situations like "I got into a car accident so my car is wrecked. I'm in hospital debt. I can't work because I'm still recovering from my injuries. I need a car for work and I cannot afford a new one. I'm struggling to survive and I'm depressed"
There would be limited avenues I think for CBT to effectively help here, because a lot of these problems are external and out of a person's control
Are you positive that this is what is going to happen?
There's a lot of helping weak members of the pack done by social animals, don't get fooled by the reductionist understanding of "survival of the fittest" that the American education system seems to teach. I believe part of the success of social animals like humans is the support they can give each other, which doesn't mean there is no survival of the fittest anymore, but that the fitness now refers the whole group rather than individuals.
And there are examples of very early humans with disabilities that would have made their care very resource-intensive for their tribe, and still they often lived long lives. This implies that these early humans helped even the weakest members, when they could just as easily have let these individuals perish to make their own lives easier.
I'm trying to say this in the kindest way, but please seek professional help, your view of reality and your relationships seems neither healthy nor sustainable to me.
It is important that you can sometimes let your guard down and not perform at the highest level imho. After all, you are not a machine, but a real human being with feelings. If you want to perform at that level, this is of course perfectly fine, but it should be because you enjoy it, or the fruits of your labor, not because you feel like you have to.
Take some of the more successful species out there: there are countless species of fungi which thrive on a mutually-beneficial relationships with the root systems of plants (check out the Wood Wide Web); or lichen, which are composite organisms arising from algae or bacteria living in fungi.
Competition is undeniably a big part of the natural world, but it's not something that captures a fraction of the complex relationships between and within species.
Appeals to this survival of the fittest nonsense justify all sorts of terrible behaviour -- and I guess in this context, self-flagellation -- but have little a very weak relationship with modern understandings of biology, history and sociology.
I don't believe you. No one is in the "top 1%" of everything you do.
I don't say this to shame you, but to make you realize that you're already okay as you are, while not being the best.
There's no way you're in the top 1% of management ability, technical knowledge, coworker relationships, parenting, exercise, finances, et cetera.
On the few axes of life where I know for sure I am better than the next 99 people I meet, I have had to practice that thing so much that I have made more than one logical jump and ability jump that counts as a filter for the next 99. It won't be overnight that I fall out of the 1%.
I suspect the same is true for anyone in any 1% of anything.
Let go of your fears.
You're not in the top 1% of posters on this site. How do you deal with that utter failure? Sure, you can make excuses, but face it, you're not in the top 1%, 10%, or even top 90% of this site in points.
These points are, of course, worthless, but holding yourself to an unachievable standard is ridiculous. One might even say it's the top 1% of ridiculousness. And how about things that are contradictory? If you're in the top 1% of people who get 8 hours of sleep every night, you're automatically disqualified from being in the top 1% of people who get 4 hours of less a night. If you're in a top 10% country for Gini inequality, are you also in a top 10% country for happiness?
You're not in the top 10% of wealth already, so you've already failed at that. Just do the best you can and have some self-compassion. By all means, push yourself to do your best, but don't kill yourself over the fact that there's always going to be someone better than you at something.
He said it with a smile, but still, there's a hard kernel of truth there for many of us: if we work hard to advance, and put ourselves in the company of top people, we no longer stand out. But you know what? Life needn't be a continual competition. Be good at what you do, do it well, and take satisfaction in that. You don't need to continuously compare yourself to everyone else, and ask if you are in the top 10%. Eventually you won't be, if only because your entire group is up there.
...look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer.
Yes, but we aren't surrounded by hyenas in the wilds of Africa. Civilization does bring some benefits. Take some time to smell the roses. Heck, a bit of time for relaxation may even improve your performance.
On the contrary being in 0.1-1% is not worth it, things like monetary success are usually more down to networking and being in the right place at the right time, top 10% software engineer can earn way more money joining right early stage startup or even tech company at the right time - like NVIDIA lately. While the 0.1% developer might spend his time at failed startup - for example, because his extreme passion might mislead them to believe field like _developer tools_ is the future.
Of course, this is written from a perspective of a person that likes what they do, but not to the point where it's what I want to do for the rest of my life. Pretty much every hour spend lead climbing outside was more fun and fulfilling than any hour spend at work.
I hope this is sarcastic because it's comically neurotic. Like you're headed for a huge breakdown.
>look at nature: The best do what they can and the weak suffer. It is sad, but its reality.
Wanna know how I know you spend 0 time in nature?
I think you should start a garden. Get in touch with actual nature. You're going to have a breakdown when you realize you're not in the top 1% of all gardens, but once you start to see perennials refuse to accept they were put in the wrong spot year after year, maybe you'll chill out.
Getting into the top 10% requires a lot more effort and will likely require you to sacrifice other things so that you can focus on that one thing.
Unless the subject is something obscure where few people have interest; getting into the top 1% often requires complete dedication. Your life revolves around that one thing and you need superior talent.
Competition drives us to be better, but often those who find themselves in that 1% are questioning if it was really worth it. You can be completely happy further down the ladder.
Turns out I had nothing to worry about. In my entire career I've met one guy that was ever "on my level".
I'd say yes-- book reading can help, but the dread of not being enough shouldn't be a part of it. Most tech people don't read. Most tech people don't code before 9AM or after 5PM. Most have never heard of hacker news. You're going to be o.k.
It feels very real to me, in the circles I run in.
When I widen my aperture, what I see is this is a form of "keeping up with the joneses", or teenagers comparing themselves to others on Instagram, or chasing the latest buzzword in technology, etc.
FOMO (fear of missing out) vs JOMO (joy of missing out) is another riff on this age-old idea.
I'd never been a huge longform reader (more like a book a month, at best) and rarely had anything to contribute. Sometimes I'd say "our documentation" because that's what I'd been working on, and when I wasn't working _I wasn't reading_ because it was too much like work to enjoy.
It eventually got profoundly uncomfortable. My manager raised my non-participation as an example of how my attitude was turning too negative for the team. I'd find out from recorded team meetings when I was out sick or on vacation that they'd crack jokes about it when I wasn't around.
It particularly odd because I arguably read as much as anyone else on that team, but I preferred either technical content related to what I was working on, or shorter works like short-story collections and articles for fun. If I wasn't reading biographies and novels, it seemingly didn't count to them.
People who keep up a book per week or month ALSO read those things. I've found many people that don't read have this notion that just going on reddit for an hour a day "is the same thing", but it's nothing like sitting down and properly diving into long form.
That being said nobody should feel bad for not doing it. It's like running a marathon, don't say it's the same because you go for a walk with the dog, but nobody should be expected to run one.
When I think about the best (as identified by both myself and widely within the org) engineers I spent the last couple of decades working with, exactly 0 of them went through a book a week.
Reading that much means you’re just skipping across some other author’s ideas. The person that reads a single article about some new algorithm or research and spends multiple hours internalizing it, trying it, analyzing it, debating it, etc is gaining far more than the book guzzlers.
Reading a book a week that competes with your responsibilities and other hobbies is a challenge.
Some friends of mine say they had huge amounts of time to read and do stuff before they had kids, but took it for granted and managed to complain about having no time.
Lots of people spend huge amounts of their time on their phones or computers passively browsing, or watching Netflix or whatever. Reducing that time and reading instead is very achievable.
This is not true for everyone, others really do still have responsibilities and hobbies that take up too much time to be able to read a book a week. Others read slowly and cannot improve. No advice about free time is one size fits all.
Reading a book is arguably easier than reading technical content or other articles, because they don't tend to be as information dense.
I prefer reading things like this: https://commoncog.com/becoming-data-driven-in-business/
But someone might like reading documentation for e.g. databases, which is also extremely information dense. I have briefly done this (https://turbopuffer.com/docs) and read other database content (https://artem.krylysov.com/blog/2023/04/19/how-rocksdb-works...), but it's not my favourite content.
Really weird to say "you read X, I read Y. We are not the same" and then follow-up with "oh but it's fine, you don't have to. But I'm X and you're Y".
I could replace a few words in your comment and make it about thinking reading books is the same as reading extremely dense technical content. It's a silly argument.
I need to keep Goodreads updated though, I've been losing the habit over the last years, because lately none of my choices come from Goodreads recommendations, but I love being able to see all I read. Thanks for the reminder!
I don't think it's weird to acknowledge people have different preferences though, I don't like running marathons but I can see how people who run them would appreciate the benefits it brings them in health and discipline! I think there's maturity in acknowledging the things you think are right for you might not be right for everyone, but still be comfortable sharing your preferences in case others see value in them. I don't see it as looking down on others which you seem to imply I'm doing.
If you intended for it to be a neutral comparison about preference I would have gone with something like triathlons, sprinting, athletics, etc.
Sure, reading a book a week takes time from your other activities and is way too much to expect, but if you had spent 15 minutes on Monday morning browsing Wikipedia on the topic of literature and brought some trivia, that would have been much appreciated.
People often complain about the soullessness of corporate jobs, but when someone tries to do something about it, there's usually huge pushback because everyone wants that something to fit their personal preferences, and since we can't find a thing that everyone likes, we go back to treating job as a pure business relationship.
There is a reason why the advice to not date or get too close to colleagues resonate with many people. There are just some workplaces that are toxic.
Sometimes, it is just better to delineate work from your personal life and interests.
Could also say the group failed to integrate a person who had different preferences for their free time and then bullied them when they weren't present at work?
I think both perspectives are quite extreme and miss the mark.
If reading a book a week in my free time was a work requirement, I would be out and quick. That sounds ridiculous!
That's also possible, depends on details of the dynamic between OP and the rest of the group
Sorry, no. That's not also possible. That's in fact exactly what happened if we believe OP's story.
THAT'S soullessness and that "mandatory" team-building exercise of book reading is actually an example of that because when layoffs come the company won't care about any of that.
It's much better to work for a company that allows you to do the job (preferably remote) and f off asap, enabling you to forge real relationships out of work in an area you actually plan to live.
God I love remote contracts...
That's workplace bullying.
At an old job I read a fiction series based on a suggestion from my manager but that's because we liked the same type of books, absolutely was not expected to be read to join the "in" crowd. If anything, we were the "out" crowd!
This does not mean I am better or worse than anyone, just that my default state is reading. Friends eventually read books when recommended them and we talk about then.
Reading shouldnt be a target, it should be for enjoyment. I enjoy shitlit, but others may not.
I read probably 6 books last year, all of them left me with some little useful takeaway. I didn't watch any shows, and none of the movies seemed remotely compelling. These numbers and whether I come away feeling good or not are basically a series of dice rolls from year to year, and I'm never desiring to do arbitrarily more of any of them; the time comes when the time comes.
I only ever want to do more when something else is diverting my attention in a way I dislike. For example, I love hiking and I love video games, but one has an endless viable season and the other doesn't.
I used to feel differently though. I used to want to persistently clear my Pocket list, but now I just let the things that really seem compelling draw me in, and the rest can sit there waiting.
Why the hell would anybody want to do that?
Do you feel some need to "apply every meal you eat to real life"? or to "apply every movie you watch"? Or every concert you hear, or every ballet you see?
(I usually read books as a way to avoid "real life" for a while...)
Same. Kindle Unlimited has an almost, uh, unlimited selection of light fluff detective fiction that's good for killing a few hours.
(Although I was pleasantly surprised by the DCI Logan series by JD Kirk which are actually amusing and fun to read.)
Ahead in what way? Reading more shitlit than anyone? I guess. It's clearly a time tradeoff, and you are probably "ahead" on something else besides book reading that you don't even think about.
I think even if you did find the time to read 150 books a year, you'd quickly be disappointed.
I'm gonna start using "shitlit" from hereon out.
And also, there are people I respect who said they read 100+ books a year, and that you should, too. But while others in my circles were eager to jump on the train, for me, I thought it would be performative, and be about having read said 100+ books than digesting any of it. And what more, I recall that I best retain info via reading if I have skin in the game, rather than feeling like reading makes me appear more approvable to others.
All that is to say, it's good to hear from someone who reads a ton that a lot of your reading is kinda junk stuff (even if 150+ books a year is still a crazy metric – and as a tangent, people who ride bikes a ton say that a lot of their miles they rack up are junk miles, so I'm sure there's an equivalent of shitlit in any pursuit/ hobby/ interest/ endeavor).
I realize I might be a relatively fast reader, and this fast reading I only did in English (while my mother tongue is Dutch), but do not underestimate how quick some people can read?
I suppose I can concur in your 'low complexity' argument: I did not read Tolkien in my teens, and probably would have skipped all the poetry while reading.
Edit: Clarification: 15 books each weekend should be read as ==>> I traded my 15 books for 15 new books each weekend, reading them during the weekend and when not in school
So you mean 15 books each week, not each weekend! I was surprised when I read that, but this makes more sense.
So my advice would be to get in the habit of reading, but be mindful of the details of the habit you are establishing.
Honestly, its not a target it is just what happens when you read a lot - you get through books.
As for YouTube or Netflix, I dont really watch that much and can't really understand how people spend that much time on them. Given that though, I read instead and lots of people dont understand that. Each to their own, happiness is different for everyone etc
not Having Netflix is a start. Realizing that most Netflix shows gets dumped mid-story after 1 or 2 seasons and will leave me without closure is another
Recently its been a lot of LitRPG stuff. Dungeon Crawler Carl, The Primal Hunter and so on. I also read most of the Hugo and Nebula lists too. Lots of SciFi in the past couple of years.
So what's the solution to that? Step back from the Internet, unsubscribe from non essential creators, close tabs without verifying if still needed, organize more and more? So trade fomo with organization? Start over with an empty browser, empty new email account?
What's your take on that?
Personally, I hoard a bunch of stuff using Omnivore and then on a semi regular basis I go through that and just throw away 90% of it. I find this two stage process useful: stage 1 is gathering All The Things, stage 2 is after a while sifting and keeping only the stuff I’m really interested in. Ultimately though, I try nowadays to apply a Buddhist angle on it: I hold all this stuff very lightly, knowing that it’s as close to infinite as makes no difference, and letting it go!
Pretty much, yes, that's the answer, at least for me. I've stopped keeping tabs on much of what's considered as being "new" and I've surrounded myself (literally, I think I might have a hoarding problem) with books that I consider to be close to my (hobby-ish) interests.
Even when it comes to those books I 100% realize that I won't have enough time to read them all, but whenever I see a mention/reference being made from a book that I'm currently reading to a second book it's good to know that I have that second book in my piles of books located around the house. Hard to logically explain, but it is what it is.
Start pulling content instead of pushing. Why are you looking for something to read? Boredom, research? Then go for the kill: what is the best option here? What is the most fun to you or the most important data you need? Prioritize mercilessly.
And filter aggressively. There is very little original and high quality content out there. Most of what is available is derivative and there's a long tail of very low quality content. Even if the topic or title seems interesting, for each 100 articles or books that sound interesting, there's likely 1 or 2 that are miles ahead of the crowd in terms of quality. Time is a great filter. Books on a given topic that are decades or centuries older than average are likely to be the source of much rehashing in a given field.
I’ve got a massive stack of books that I want to read and I feel some frustration sometimes that I can’t get through them quicker, because I want to read more! But this is an internal metric and not one I’ve ever compared to anything or anyone else.
I’m a fiction reader mainly; maybe this sense isn’t the case if I had a stack of business books? I don’t know.
If I notice that I'm falling behind it's because I'm not taking enough me time. It's so easy to get wrapped up in work, research, deadlines, grants, students, etc. Then you burn out.
Reading stats are a way to keep that at bay. And even better it's cumulative and I can't cheat. If I've been really busy this month, I have to make even more room next month to catch up. That space gets filled with afternoons where I relax, sip tea, enjoy the view, read, learn something new, get a new perspective, or just live in another world for a while.
What an awful take on life and reading.
TV series, books, movies, bands, whatever. I'll partake if I fancy it, if I don't, who cares? I won't be cool? I never was cool, and hell, they changed what it was anyway.
Why create fake tasks to stress yourself out? Reading should be enjoyable, not a chore. And not all books are created equal. If you spend all year reading Remembrance of Things Past is that bad because you only read one book instead of reading 50 forgettable pop psychology business book of the month books? I don't think so.
Knowing that I'm a week behind or whatever tells me that I've been focusing on things that don't make me as happy as reading books does, and I should make an effort to spend less of my day watching YouTube and more of it reading books (that's what I spent that time on, not reading Proust).
I don't think I'd call it stress, I think anxiety is a more accurate term, but it's a helpful form of anxiety. I've also been reading with friends on a schedule, and the anxiety of having to be ready for our next meeting makes me read more too. Again, I find it really useful and it's made me generally happier day-to-day.
I’ve found hat most books are roundly useless in application — which is fine if you are having fun. But if you’re not your just wasting time.
I think adding something to my mental model of the world is a benefit, yes, but I'm not sure that's what you mean. I find that reading books enriches my life in a way that YouTube doesn't (with many, many exceptions).
Maybe let's try a concrete example: The Republic. It taught me about ancient Greek society, made me feel a connection to people that lived 2400 years before me, made me interested in the ancient Greek language, gave me lots of ethical questions to discuss with my friends, caused me to slow down and deliberately think through many important problems, and allowed me to take part in the intellectual tradition that people have been participating in for over two millennia.
It did not make me overthrow the government, so it goes under "roundly useless in application", but at least I "had fun", so I wasn't just "wasting time"?
What do you do with all your time?
It's the same thing for me. I don't have any goal for books, but I look back and think "hey, last month I wasn't reading too much, why is that?"
This year I'm also interested in movies, so I set a goal to watch at least 4 per month. It's more to make sure I don't waste time on Youtube/TikTok/Social Media, and take the time to do things I enjoy more in the long run
I have all the time in the world to read things that are interesting (to me) and really absorb the content. But I've increasingly been noticing a "recipe article" trend with blog posts. People throw 100 words in when 10 will do. This article is an example.
I've even gotten to the point with certain important blog posts where I copy paste the content to chatgpt with a simple prompt to summarize the main points.
I'm not happy that I have to do this, but people have seemingly forgotten the art of getting to the f'ing point.
Your audience has an attention slightly shorter than this comment. Unless you catch their attention, none of your nuance is going to matter.
Generally I've found just skimming the first line of each paragraph works well, but even that is getting harder to find.
The technology changes just allow those companies to be more ruthlessly inane about it.
Some companies measure and human attention as an exploitable asset, yet individuals have a hard time controlling who takes it from them and how much... Is that a market failure? Or just a physiological one?
I agree with your points though in general. I think this is even worse with many non-fiction books. So much fluff when the main points could be summarized in 10 pages.
Well that’s too much work. But here is an LLM produced summary of the text:
Molly Templeton's article, "On Letting Go of the Idea of 'Keeping Up'," explores the pressures of contemporary reading culture, contrasting it with the joy of reading she experienced in childhood, symbolized by earning gold stars for each book read. She describes how, as an adult, reading has become entangled with competition, social performance, and the need to keep up with trends, turning the solitary pleasure of reading into a public performance marked by obligations and quantifiable achievements.
Templeton criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have transformed reading into a task-oriented activity, where success is measured by the number of books read, detracting from the intrinsic value of reading itself. She shares personal anecdotes from her time in New York's bookish circles, where she felt the pressure to be well-read and current, highlighting the anxiety that can come with trying to meet external expectations.
Templeton recalls a turning point when being asked about her recent reads felt more like a competition than a shared interest, prompting her to reevaluate her relationship with reading. She argues for a reading culture that values personal experience over productivity, emphasizing that the number of books one reads should not dictate one's worth as a reader.
Templeton advocates stepping away from the competitive and overwhelming aspects of online book communities to reclaim reading as a personal, unquantifiable joy. Her reflections serve as a reminder that the true value of reading lies in the individual growth, enjoyment, and insights it provides, far beyond any statistic or social media status.
It feels to me that Templeton needs to re-evaluate her relationships with friends asking this instead of with reading. Sometimes I read a lot, sometimes barely at all but I don't get questions from friends like "Only two books in half a year? Bro, do you even read?!".
Summary:
geuis: I've noticed a trend of "recipe articles" that are overly wordy when they could be more concise. I've resorted to using ChatGPT to summarize key points of important blog posts, as the authors don't seem to value their audience's attention span.
meristohm: I've become more selective about what I read as I've realized I can't consume everything. I don't feel compelled to finish books that don't interest me anymore.
msy: The problem is that much of the content is generated by language models, creating "expensive noise" rather than meaningful signal.
Terr_: The degradation of communication for the sake of advertising revenue is a market failure, as individuals struggle to control how much of their attention is taken.
bicx: I often skip to the end of articles to see if there's a coherent conclusion, and if so, I'll go back and read the body. I agree that non-fiction books in particular tend to be overly padded.
HKH2: The worst fluff is when authors use excessive analogies or anecdotes without clearly explaining what the reader should take away.
throwaway2037: Why read the full novel when you can just read the back cover or watch a short summary? People seem to value efficiency over depth these days.
steviem: I read a lot of "shitlit" or inconsequential literature, but I don't see that as better or worse than anyone else. Reading should be for enjoyment, not a target to hit.
deebosong: I respect people who read a lot, but I worry that reading 100+ books per year could become more about appearances than true engagement.
theK: How does someone manage to read 150 books per year? What's their routine and how do they avoid distractions?
harrisi: When you get in the habit of reading regularly, you can read books surprisingly quickly.
spxneo: Reading 150 books per year is impressive, but it would be tough to apply all that content to real life.
If the 90 min film gets hopelessly boring, I wouldn't hesitate to stop watching. Heck I've abandoned 10 minute YouTube videos because it got boring.
I have abandoned novels halfway because it was boring. Perhaps it may have been the greatest novel ever and I'm missing out by not completing it, but it's okay for me. Now I'm not saying it should be interesting right from page 1. But if it's not reached any major plot point by page 200, I'm skipping.
Relevant discussion about this from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35340083
You're not happy you have to do this- why do you have to do this, again?
The passage discusses the author's experience with the growing sense of competition and obligation around reading and book consumption. It criticizes the way platforms like Goodreads have turned reading into a quantifiable task, with people feeling pressure to read a certain number of books per year. The author argues that reading should be about the experience and personal enjoyment, not about keeping up with others or hitting reading goals. The passage encourages readers to step away from the social media side of reading and not worry about the "right" way to read. It emphasizes that the value of reading is not quantifiable and that people should read at their own pace without external pressure.
(And sure, maybe some articles are just bad, and don't have writing which captivates anyone, but an article is not a bad article just because it is long or just because can be summarized with fewer words by someone who merely wanted to "get to the f'ing point", and if you come into articles with that mindset you are also going to find slow movies extremely boring and whine about "nothing happened"; but... did you feel anything?)
If you don't get it, you are not understanding what more than half the population is about. Not to worry, almost all people don't understand themselves, others or the world at large and LLMs will not help, since they are trained on data produced by people who don't understand much of anything :)
I want to be very clear about what I wrote above: I am not criticizing the quality of their work. There are plenty of people in the letters who annoy me to no end with their navel gazing, but produce fantastic work. Please keep these two separate!
The best part of this article: She realises it is all bullshit. In short: Read what you like. And, don't worry too much about other people. Another good title for this article: "A Letter to My Younger Self".
I've always thought of and used reading as a solitary past-time.
It spent too long just describing the FOMO and how it can creep up on your mental health though, for my taste at least.
It's true that the first step of fixing a problem is to identify it but I believe they could have just said "Even if it's your job to keep up, put limits in place because it will stress you to the point of ruining other aspects of your life".
So that article is kind of at the "beginner level in the area of how modern-day tech can stress you out", I suppose. Valuable for people who are stressed but haven't understood why just yet.
but I don't see any of this cultural expectation, this peer pressure. (One of my friends keep recommending me books and movies, but that's an exception. Okay, I saw Pikkety's Capital on a different friend's bookshelf. And that's it.)
...
and it's also interesting because I remember when half of the world was waiting for GRRM to stop trampolining!
I purposefully put down the last book somewhere around halfway because I thought the next one will be upon us soon, so it'll be great to pick it up and read the remaining story in one go. Hah.
And somehow after Banks died I stopped reading books. (Sure, no connection, but well, it would have been nice to get more of his funky space stories!)
He has some good things to say, but he wrote more than he had to to say them. That book is too big.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/th... ( https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/inequality-might-be-going-down... )
> That book is too big.
Most non-fiction books are best "consumed" by watching a few talks or podcast episodes by the author(s) and a few others by critics.
And pacific heights won’t come up at the top 5 richest neighborhoods in the world because the data publicaly available is crap… you need to see know and run in the circles to see how much shadow wealth is going around
There was shadow wealth at every point of the last decade, so it's already factored in, the numbers (and studies) are already taking that into account, ... unless! Unless folks suddenly started to commit more tax fraud. (Which is hard to do if your money comes from capital.)
https://budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/issues/2021/4/30/map-i...
The US is still the wild west in many regards (from good old identity fraud to sheriffs/judges/prosecutors with license to bully anyone without the right connections) and of course the basically institutionalized various other scams come to mind (thriving MLMs, tax exempt religious orgs and megachurches, doctors turned sales-reps for opiates, payday loans, untouchable plants and mining operations polluting and leaving deadly open pits, you know ...), but if there's one thing you can't really fault the US for is getting lazy on private property regulations. And neither the IRS nor the CA FTB is known for being completely clueless.
Scoring yourself with stars or notches for the books you read - or like my dad, a box of donuts every time he slept with a new woman - that's some fucked up abnormal unhealthy shit.
What this shows is that even the most innocent of online coms based on gamified popularity metrics will always trend toward feelings of loss of self-worth for the players.
Why? Because gamifying social interaction is a pretty good definition of sociopathy. Forcing the genpop to engage in that game 24/7, and to treat social interaction as a system of rewards, has spread the sociopathy from the founders like a disease to the rest of the world.
Maybe "use your time well" is a better thought?
Focusing on beating X just makes it a metric, and can be destructive when you'd be better off switching to some completely different activity instead.
When it's a metric, you can be tied to keep meeting it (or even just attempted to) well past it's usefulness.
From reading the article the whole thing appears to be caused by their job and their friends.
If I had that job maybe I'd get infected by this mindset too, I'm glad I'm not.