Less online reading, more book reading
Draft! |
This page is a draft and may be incomplete, incorrect, or just a
stub or outline. I've decided to allow myself to put draft pages on
my website as an experiment. I'm hoping they will:
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Back to Dave’s book pages.
waiting for computer: read a book or magazine. don’t surf!
I don’t watch a lot of video or too much scrolling of feeds most of the time. I am reading stuff. But I’m not always reading the most nutritious stuff, especially when I’m just killing a little time or otherwise avoiding a task I should be doing… So I end up reading what must be tens of thousands of words every day that could have been words in a book or long-form magazine article.
Why the paper (or e-ink) matters: it ends! it’s cohesive! there’s no hyperlinks!
In the last two years, I’ve discovered that "doom scrolling" isn’t the only reason I’m unhappy when I’m online too long. It’s even the blogs and the long-form writing. I wrote about that in the "social media" section of this card about tech addiction and burnout.
Why books (or even magazines) are better
I cover some of this same ground in Why I Read Technical Books. TODO: link back when done with this page
go deeper, go harder
insights, inspires me to think about a different viewpoint, often leads to my own creative output - "microblogs" almost never do that. not exactly sure why.
read original sources
written by human beings. I won’t read slop. And it’s so exhausting to be a slop detective all day long, trying to avoid it.
I am so sorry to new and current authors, but I’m starting to flat out avoid anything written after the year 2023 unless I know and trust the author pretty well.
No hyperlinks!
Viktor Löfgren wrote a really compelling post explaining why reading with hyperlinks can be so distracting (and tiring).
When reading the text, we must make a decision when arriving at each link what to make of it. Should we click it? No, continue. Should we click it? No, continue. We don’t make these decisions consciously for the most part, but we still need to make them. We are further pummeled by links to the sides that clamor for our attention.
It’s for this reason that I swear by using the Unhook browser extension to remove all recommendations from YouTube. I find myself completely unable to ignore the compelling thumbnail suggestions on the side of the page. I would often open up about 30 browser tabs with videos I thought looked interesting. I would also often skip from video to video, like channel surfing in the old television days. (I was never a channel surfer myself, but I saw people do it.)
The point is, it’s nearly impossible to concentrate on something when there’s a dozen REALLY EXCITING things vying for your attention right there on the same page.