Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction (2019)

First off, thanks. I really appreciate your comment and the chance to reflect. Hoping my comment comes across as fair :)

> is really about the author's "I", a foray into autobiography

I do feel there's some irony here on this "anti-narrative" perspective being at the top, as it always is on HN. (No disrespect intended, as I empathize with what you're saying, blueyes.)

To explain: I feel with "distraction",we're all talking around patience, information and narrative. Novels and long-form storytelling are information (wisdom) buried in complex narrative. And these stories, in a way, are a microcosm of the world we live in. They are perhaps practice for grappling with and distilling meaning from the complex world. To revel in a fuzzy and meandering story is to revel in a sandboxed version of the same process by which the world delivers us most lessons.

And I would argue there is huge value in sharing information in narratives, because that data/knowledge is "warmed" by empathy and grounded in imagery of physical space and experience and other things that lodge in our minds (moreso in some than others, true) in some very human ways.

But we all here (and I include myself) cannot seem to focus on even this article's grounding personal narrative, because we want the succinct information, the quick fix, the distilled solution... like addicts who've abdicated responsibility for parsing that same wisdom and personal revelation from the complex and ambiguous narrative itself.

I'm personally trying lately NOT to believe any set of universal fixes can possibly be prescribed, and that there are instead a million appropriate fixes that will take shape in the minds of each reader. That feels like a step toward the complexity that is more like the real world I live in.

I found myself reading the whole comment, adding "to me" to each line. And I can't disagree with it in that reading.

> I hope that we get more people working on tools and methods that save us from the Internet, and fewer posts asking for our attention while they lament it.

The general (ish) perspective of the larger comment (and proposed cure) feels very symptomatic of the disease to me <3

>This comment is about the tone of the post in The Paris Review. There's a kind of elegiac primitivism circulating among the cultural elite that rubs me wrong, both in Birkerts and the contemporary reviewer.

Funny! It's the exact opposite that rubs me wrong, and I see it all the time from both fellow nerds, pundits, and so on...

It's like many people believe all of history is either a blob with no ups and downs - it just is what it is forever -, or a straight arrow to even better things.

It's like loss, nostalgia, or even the hint that some things could have been better is if not forbidden strongly discouraged... - lest one be considered insufficiently modern, which appears to be one of the big crimes today...

I've been worrying about this for a while.

I think there are 2 things at play; the first is a gradual wearing of our attention span in a world where we can scroll through the whole worlds news and everyone's opinion on it, in the time it takes to defecate. A continuous flow of intellectual snacks - some healthy, some junk - is habit forming. Without judgement whether it's a good or a bad thing, it's certainly a thing.

The second (which I think is exacerbated by the first) is plain old cognitive friction : it requires more brain energy to invest in book. A full page of small font text, vocabulary stretching language, vivid images created by words, high concept theories, different plot elements to assemble; all of these represent a much high load on the cranial CPU - and that's not to say we can't do it, but that we are subconsciously reluctant to make the effort.

In the same way that if your loaded gym bag is waiting at the end of the bed, you're much more likely to get to the gym than if you have to hunt through the laundry, search for your membership card, find your car keys etc etc.

I think this is covered by Dan Kahneman in Thinking Fast & Slow, but i could be mistaken.

Anyway, it's a thing.

In bed before going to sleep.

No distractions, comfortable position (obviously you would need some pillows), and it helps wind down your brain. In the weekend you can also pick up the book again in the morning if you wish. The benefit: you sleep there every day, so you can read a bit every day.

I don't use a smartphone, so no computer in bed means no incoming messages or time-sinks available at the touch of a button; I would recommend leaving the smartphone in another room or having a set routine of placing it in some kind of zero disturbance (or call only) night setting. Whatever works to stop you from grabbing it for some more mindless scrolling in bed. The time you use for reading must come from somewhere, so cut down on the low-value entertainment (this may be hard, I don't know).

Going to bed is something to look forward to when your book is there waiting for you once it is part of your routine. A good book beats starting another episode on Netflix once you've found the genres or writers that work for you.

I struggled with this for a long time, and I have now found a solution that works sometimes (ie as long as I don't sabotage myself):

I bought an alarm clock. Basic $10 Casio thing, but anything else is also fine as long as it's "dumb". After a certain time in the evening, and in the morning before I eat breakfast, nothing with an internet connection is allowed in my bedroom. That's my reading time.

It's actually more difficult for me as my bedroom is also my office, so I need to unplug my laptop and put it in the living room overnight, but someone living in a bigger house/apartment than me would not have that particular issue.

I'm in a similar situation. Unless it's something I can work through (with examples or problems) or something I care about (very ephemeral), it's hard to carve out the focus or time for it.

I tried starting "Emperor's New Mind" by Penrose a month or so back. I don't think I made it past chapter one. Currently I'm binging Stephenson's "Anathem" (I fucking love this book), and feel a little bit of excitement at digging into the sources, but I'm afraid it will end up like most bibliographies I scour - well-intentioned lists I hardly ever make any progress on.

Despite my avoidance of FB, IG, etc, I still find myself spending an inordinate amount of time on Reddit or even HN. But the occasional hit of something truly useful (the Cesium for UE4 post was intriguing to me, as a project at work a few years back was attempting something similar on a smaller scale), but the constant low-level dopamine from neophilia keeps me constantly scrolling, but ultimately listless and depressed at the end of the day.

Oftimes I wonder if it wouldn't be better to make my own pinprick math, but I'm just too addicted to the Reticulum.

I started turning books into cloze flash cards. it forces me to pay attention and I can read in small chunks. If book is really really good I would retype it. If its really really good it becomes memory palace. But this is my passion and of course everyone cant do that. So try audiobooks and take long walks. Also it is really healthy to avoid screens 60 minutes before sleep and reading paper is nice way to do that.

I feel like listening would be a good alternative, say when driving or doing house work. I hear long blog articles of yesteryear got replaced by audio formats (podcasts?), or audio books for whole books, but I’m too much of a geezer to learn and understand how to use them and try to figure out what’s good (hey at least with written stuff you can Scroll through quickly and see whether you like it, not so easy with audio).

I drop in and out of frequent reading. I find that using my Kindle really helps bring me back into the habit, because I can read in any lighting and it always keeps my place (for some reason I never use bookmarks in real books). Once I've read the Kindle for a bit, I'm ready to put my hands back on real books.

Maybe reach for something easy, too--a book or series you enjoyed in your youth, long enough ago that you won't remember every detail. Save Tolstoy for later :)

Starting a reading accountability group has been incredibly helpful for me. Every day we post what we've read as we try to make reading (even the tiniest bit) a daily habit.

Rgd empty calories, most likely yes. So it is good to have a skill to skim a blog post first to determine if it is worth reading. Writer's reputation also helps.

Terence Tao's hierarchy helped me here - book > paper > blog post > buzz note > tweet. He once wrote somewhere that he chose his medium depending on how developed the thought he wished to express was (or something to that effect).

(Remember "Gooogle Buzz"?)

A lot of books are empty calories and even good ones can became if you dont internalize it. I reread books over time and every time I get something different out of it but if I force to read something just to cross it of the list I usually forget I read it in couple months

> But the time and quality of thought required to put words into print was a higher bar, and ostensibly higher quality on average, than the time and quality of thought I put into writing a quick blog post or vapid tweet.

Very much so. It took me a long time to figure out why I could never get into podcasts, and even interviews or talks by authors I respect are boring to me. Writing books takes a lot of work, and they are almost always better organized and more coherent than other forms of information (such as forum comments . . . ). You get more "intellectual nourishment" from books, especially good books.

> I’m all for the promise of the Internet of giving a voice to the voiceless. But the time and quality of thought required to put words into print was a higher bar, and ostensibly higher quality on average, than the time and quality of thought I put into writing a quick blog post or vapid tweet.

I used to read a lot when I was younger. A lot of it was junk. I enjoyed it, I would not mind if my kids read it, but really, it did not had more quality in it then random blog.

It depends on how deep you want to go. Sometimes a shallow blog post is fine (e.g. privileges for vaccinated people?) and sometimes you need more.

Yes, same thing (and also Boox Note3). If you take a device and switch off the wifi/gsm on it so you cannot get anything from outside, it really helps me focus for reading time. Even a little bit too much (I tend to finish a book in one go, no matter what else happens in the world around me); I often don't notice that hours pass by and people tried to reach me.

> as a non-native English speaker

There are books in your own language right? I do everything in English (as non-native English speaker as well) now, so read English at the same speed as my native language (Dutch), but I do read books in Dutch (and other languages) as well.

How does the BOOX compare to a Remarkable?

For reading, my primary device isn't an e-ink tablet, or even an audio-player. It's the book.

Hacks like this sound promising. Especially at T+30 days. But I wonder how well it will work across longer spans of time. Say at T+24 months?

My experience is that these habits work until "the pillars" of my life (people, place, and routine) shift. I had low screen-time before COVID: but not after. Buying a new house had similar affect. A new friend or social media app (looking at you Clubhouse) interrupts my flow and I fall back into the scroll-hole once again.

Every few months I need to re-learn how to fight against the PC in my pocket. I always find a way. But never get the sense that I've "leveled-up".

Yes! Here it is the birds that start their morning concert that alert me to the fact that the book is just way too interesting.

I have the same reading habits as you (pretty much exclusively from a screen), but your post (and another talking about reading as many books as possible) reminded me of a conversation I had with my english teacher in ninth grade.

I forget exactly how we got to the topic, but someone in the class asked him what music he liked to listen to on his way to school. he looked taken aback, almost shocked by the question. he said something like, "oh I could never listen to music in the car; I wouldn't be able to pay attention to the road! I can only listen to music sitting in a chair by myself at home." he was a young guy btw, playing cds/cassettes/radio in a car had been normal for his entire life. I thought that was kind of absurd at the time, but I think about it every once in a while. what was so different about his experience of music that he literally couldn't do anything else while listening? does my listening to music while I work, while I drive, or while I walk around the city make it impossible for me to experience it the way he does?

He said he don't read books. He did not said he don't read.