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.
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 ).
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!
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.
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).
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.
Or, you could try the opposite, and slow down. It sounds like torture, but eventually, it will become habitual.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.