I Learned to Read Again
substack.magazinenongrata.com
substack.magazinenongrata.com
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.
Almost every study that looks at this finds that there is. Between the time for deeper contemplation, cognitive load of sustained attention and greater potential information content of a larger body of text compared with a smaller one, someone who reads books is generally going to more competently understand things gestures generally than someone who gets everything from articles online.
Have they found a modern day metric that we should all be hunting in our quest for reading health? A literary equivalent to the daily 10,000 steps?
Maybe 10,000 words!
Talking about fiction read for entertainment of course. HN does tend to assume books are only for learning something.
I've been learning about wood turning and carving recent and the amount of character it instils in what use to be dead piece of furniture in a room is honestly life changing. Reading can do this but there are other physical activities which I think a digital society loses touch with. Most of the Ikea furniture today is well engineering but artistically dead (definitely cheaper though :D ).
The second chapter of every book has the advantage of being written, taking for granted that the previous chapter was read. The density and complexity writers and readers can handle in each chapter, keeps increasing throughout a book.
Short reads can convey important things, but nowhere near as many per page.
If you took any wonderful dense book about anything important, and turned it into short reads, with lower correlations of who finds them, reads them, and when, the page count would have to increase 10x - 100x. The setups and redundancy would be immense.
Books also get to explore many perspectives on the same important ideas. Which is not redundancy. It is the difference between recognizing a good idea and understanding it.
Feeling an epiphany vs. absorbing its implications. Awareness vs. fluency.
My personal theory is that wisdom comes from deep, long-form reasoning. You can't get it just by skimming short articles or memorizing isolated facts. When we read a deep and comprehensive book, the real value is the mental labor. It forces us to follow a long, complex argument, spot subtle patterns, and actively debate the author in our heads. We have to weave different facts together to see the bigger picture.
This kind of "hard reading" actually changes our brain by building new neural connections. Wisdom goes beyond collecting information. It's more about the cognitive journey of thinking deeply and widely about a topic. Short articles give us data points, but books train us how to think.
Of course, serious researches may tell us otherwise. I don't have any data points outside my personal experience.
I know its such a common thing to suggest, but if you haven't, I really would suggest reading Understanding Media by Marshall McLuhan.
tl;dr is that every single medium of communication shapes the message it is trying to deliver. This is unavoidable and once you understand that you begin to see it everywhere (LLMS? yes).
1. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59794522-non-things
2. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/236849376-attensity
First one I highly recommend. Second one I'm reading now, so far it's.. okay. The ideas in the book resonate with me but the writing is poor. The first book (Non-Things) talks about our relation to the digital versus the physical, and it convinced me to stop using my phone as much.
Reading a book is a bit more like getting into a "flow" state writing code (although, with LLMs now doing most of the writing, that may not happen any more either). You become immersed in the prose, getting all the characters and the roles they play in the story into your mental context. You tune out the rest of the world to some degree, lose track of passing time, and if you are interrupted it feels like a jolt and it takes a while to get back into that state.
I read a lot of books in my 20s. Many were forgettable, but a couple totally realigned my view of reality and what was possible and I went off to create a highly unconventional life because of them.
I then stopped reading books in my 30s - that time mostly got spent reading web articles and social media instead. This was a stagnant period of my life in many ways.
In my 40s I started to wonder if there might be a connection and I started making a conscious effort to start reading books again. Surprise surprise, a few years later I'm experiencing one of the most creative and productive periods of my life.
A great book will take a big idea and expound on it from multiple angles. It'll build both a logical and an emotional case for looking at the world differently. For me at least this type of shift in thinking takes reading multiple chapters worth of good arguments get it fully embedded in my brain.
Remember, the author of a great book may spend _years_ researching it before he even gets started on the writing part. The best books are next level stuff and I feel no other medium compares.
There will of course be many books that don't have this impact and end up being throwaways. I will buy them and if they aren't hooking me I simply don't finish them.
I think this all applies equally to fiction and non-fiction.
I think there might be some people out there who've experienced this degree of personal change from interacting with certain online communities. That's the only analogue I can think of. For me though it's books.
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.
I'd like this to be true, but Socrates immediately comes to mind as a perfect counter example of someone who was opposed to writing and was arguably one of the greatest thinkers ever.
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.
How to Read a Book is definitely worth skimming, but it is quite repetitive and filled with unnecessary volume. It would get the job done at 1/10th the length.
Ironically, one of the points made in the book—and close to your point—is that even in the greatest book of all time there are passages that are more and less worthwhile. The art of being a good reader is identifying the worthwhile and going over it slowly (maybe even rereading it) and identifying the less worthy and going over it quick.
The nice thing about spending more time with HTRAB is it forces you to think about reading. That’s a worthwhile way to spend a few hours.
I know its just an escape mean for me, a tool to not be there but it stop me from doing other more interesting stuff
Your environment is your destiny, if your environment is littered with distractions you will be distracted.
I can't remember which author it was right now but they made the point about weight loss. You will hear countless of stories of people saying "I spent six months in this US city with great restaurants, man I gained 30 pounds", but you never hears someone trying to lose weight by moving to a place where people are thin.
People spend tens of billions on individualized life hacks, diets, training programs, gyms and half the population is obese. In Japan barely anyone is obese and you ask the average person why they're thin and they just shrug, have never spend a buck on a personal trainer.
If you ever plotted effort against outcomes from people who promote "individual willpower" as a solution to everything I don't think you could come up with a worse program. Surround yourself with the people and places you want to be like, that's all you need to do.
It's harder to modify what restaurants and online orders are available to you, but maybe you can work up to blocking or uninstalling those apps or something?
It's easy to learn how to make an interesting variety of simple dishes with a relatively small number of staple ingredients. It doesn't end up taking more time than going out or waiting on DoorDash.
Going cold turkey is never easy. If you're having trouble withdrawing, consider what I did over for Facebook over a decade ago:
1. Turn off notifications for the Facebook (read: your main social media) app on your phone; then
2. Turn off notifications for the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps (read: all other social media) on your phone; next
3. Delete the Facebook app from your phone; then
4. Delete the Facebook Messenger, Instagram, et cetera apps from your phone; and finally
5. Log out of Facebook on your desktop.
It took me 2 years to go through from step 1 to step 5. It has made me happier and more productive. I still have a Facebook account.
But the friction of grabbing my laptop and logging in forces me to consider "is this what I want to do? Or am I thoughtlessly reaching for the crack pipe?" (It's been about a decade since I've cared to log into Facebook. Last time I tried, it felt like trudging through spam in an old e-mail inbox more than anything compelling.)
Not in a religious way, just have a no screens day every week, once a month, or just once.
You can get by one day without texting, looking for directions, getting an answer from google, ordering takeout, etc. etc. etc. Set yourself a boundary, no phones unless there's a fire or somebody needs to go to the hospital and stick to it. Make a schedule.
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??
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.
Now my JOB is to look at screens, I am confronted with screens in public and I am expected to be responsive on my mobile screen device both in social life and at work.
Sure, I can employ all sorts of techniques to curb screen addiction but it is the same issue as all these weight loss programs. The Yo-Yo-Effect with screens is unavoidable no matter what state of mind you reach. I know people who take week long vacations in silent monasteries with immense benefit to their mental health. That benefit is curb stomped by modern society within days of their return to "normal" life!
Edit - via the visual boost of short form video
No. Of course not. Someone who can't read due to mental disability isn't morally inferior to someone who can and does.
Sure. I'm answering it by another measure. Killing is, ceteris paribus, morally inferior to not killing. I'd argue a psychopath is henceforth morally debilitated despite it not really being their "fault" that they're born without empathy. This, in turn, helps me conclude that a murderer is, in fact, doing wrong.
Same here. Someone who can't read isn't inherently less morally capable than someone who can. What reading gives one is the capacity to gain a better understanding of ethics and morals. So I'd guess folks who read books are, on average, more intelligent and at least seeking to conduct themselves in a more moral fashion than someone who doesn't. But that doesn't make spending time reading morally superior to some other activity.
The only correlation that reading and intelligence have is that intelligent people find it easier to read, and therefore enjoy reading more, and therefore read more. It's not the other way around.
it's my personal hot-take, but I think that a majority of those background listeners are doing performative "learning" and aren't learning anything really. It's just to brag once a year that they have "read" 100+ books in a year and post a wall of covers or a number on their social network feed.
Basically, books aren't morally superior media than anything else really. But focused and monopoly attention dedicated to some media is morally superior to a performative background "learning". Books simply eliminate even a possibility of reading them in background.
Yes. Because its less information that "Oral" which is just video content.
Text is raw information. Viewing a person speaking is Information + social and context clues. Clues that humans find it very hard to resist. We are social mammals built to fathom our place in the hierarchy by listening to the noises and expressions of other mammals. People will tell you that they love science or philosophy or something, but often what they actually love is the person telling them about it. With monetised content being the norm these days, people are exploiting these side channels while handing out sub par information. And it works. You only need to look at the flat earth movement, almost entirely built on video content, to see the truth in this. People aren't signing up to be flat earthers because the information is valid, they are signing up because they like the people giving them the faulty information.
No we would absolutely be better off going back to reading. Its much healthier.
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.
There are also exercises which help develop short term memory like n-back training for which there are many phone apps.
Also doing something mindless helps. The dishes, the laundry, moderate exercise.
I can't pay attention to most audiobooks at 1x, I get bored between words.
Or, you could try the opposite, and slow down. It sounds like torture, but eventually, it will become habitual.
Just like a movie, if I really like it, I could decide to read it again, and discover things I didn't get the first time around. But there is no requirement to spot every detail the first time.
Do you have allergies? Rashes when you eat some food? Trembling hands? Some skin problems? Hearing loss or tinnitus? Are you abnormally tired after sports? Do you have abnormal cramps after sports or drinking alcohol, or when not sleeping enough? Regular teeth health issues? Do you have a sensitive vague nerve? Did you faint more than other people in the course of your life? Does your body need more time to heal? Do you feel dizziness when standing up? Have you always had the impression that you actually aren't that stable on your feet, even while actually practising a lot of sports? What about headaches and migraines? When you work, have you specialised in some tasks that are/feel quite systematic for you? Are social interactions or other tasks that require new analysis exhausting for you? These are signs that you optimise your energy expenditure by focusing on tasks that barely require you to think with much energy.
Lack of energy is a very good reason for the brain to avoid using energy for its executive function, the function that is actually impaired in people with ADHD. It's normal, and trying to fix that feels exhausting, which is why people with ADHD avoid spending that energy.
The executive function is preliminary to focusing with other parts of the brain. If it's impaired, the brain won't even try to focus with other parts for the actual work. Two problems solved at once. Twice the energy spared.
Find the root cause of your ADHD (which often is just a symptom) and fix it.
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.
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).
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.
Respectfully, I would disagree with you on this statement. I don't feel that it is implying your point, or certainly not to that extent.
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.
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)
s/^/How /