Growing up, I was a reader. I had no video games, almost no computer use, limited TV/movie time, and lived in a rural area. But there were other things to do: be outside, play with toys in my room (mostly Legos, Fisher Price, and GI Joes), or read. Reading was an hours-a-day sort of thing for me. Mom had hundreds (and eventually thousands) of books in the house, and I was actively encouraged to devour all of them. Fiction, nonfiction, old books, new books, didn't matter. We visited the library frequently, and I'd often check out dozens of books at a time.
Reading taught me about the world. I learned the difference between sedimentary and igneous rock, what life was like during the Great Depression, how Homer Price always seemed to get involved in strange happenings, why the dogs are climbing up the tree (for a dog party! a big dog party!), and on and on. I won a contest at the local library where everyone came in pajamas and spent hours seeing who could read the most books.
As I got into middle school and high school, I lived in the library during the school day. Scoured the fiction shelves for anything I could find. Lots of good fantasy, thrilling sci-fi, and still a decent chunk of non-fiction. I don't think it's hyperbole to say that in 15 years of public education (ages 3 through 18), I did most of my learning from books.
Then I turned 18 and it all ended, almost overnight.
I left home for college and got a tablet. Then I got a laptop. And I was young and dumb and naive to the ways of the tech world. I had always been good with computers, but I didn't understand that so much of the tech world is marketing, selling the idea of buying expensive tech crap and installing the latest vaporware, just so that you can feel like Steve Jobs or whatever.
My first tech was a Nexus tablet in 2012. I didn't have a smartphone. I had heard Apple was for suckers. Android/Google were the cool edgy rebels on the block. A tablet with Android Jellybean was going to take care of everything that I should have done with a phone, LAPTOP, and camera. Dumb. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Sidenote: I'm ashamed to say it wasn't the last time that I tried to substitute dumb future tech for a friggin' laptop. In 2017, I thought Google Daydream -- you know, the flash-in-the-pan VR thingy -- would take the place of a personal computer. Not a good plan.
Anyway, my reading almost totally ceased in 2012. Never recovered. It's been a dozen years and I never got back to that level of books. Sure, I still read books here and there. Maybe even more than the average person my age. But for the better part of 12 years, most of the time I formerly spent reading was devoted to YouTube, video games, random internet browsing, etc.
It's a subject for another time, but I think that 18 years of tech deprivation had left me with almost no power to resist the sudden flood of media. Like someone without vaccines, I caught all the bugs.
As the years passed, I started to notice things. My vocabulary was deteriorating. My worldview felt a little constricted. My ability to think about ideas was kind of sluggish. I don't want to oversell this -- I was definitely still more articulate and thoughtful (if I may flatter myself) than many of the people around me. But for the baseline that the first 18 years of my life had set, I was falling behind.
Well, I'm 31 years old now.
Still youngish, but definitely out of time to be frittering my life away. And I have things that I want to learn and things I want to do and a shelf full of books to read. But the books need to take a backseat for now, because I'm also crash-coursing my way through learning to code and that's going to take a lot of my time for the next 6-12 months, at least.
So here's what I've decided. For the next year or so, I'm going to read books on the backburner and I'm not going to judge myself for that. A book or two a month is plenty of velocity for an adult with as much on my plate as I have.
But the thought that I've been thinking about the most for the last week is that I'm going to let myself start counting the blogs, news, technical documentation, and essays that I'm reading on a daily basis.
That's right. Turns out that, although tech did take the first 8-ish years since 2012, I've actually started reading prolifically for the last five or six years, if you count those other resources. And I haven't done that. I've kept to this idea that 'real' reading is doing what 13-year-old me would do, which is read a stack of books in a week.
Well, I'm an adult now. I have a laptop and I work in a field that involves working on that laptop. And I've read enough about nutrition in the past few years to recognize that a hardline extreme diet (where you can only eat 'allowed' foods) can be almost as bad as no diet (where you just eat random crap). Well, I don't want to hardline it and I don't need to waste my days on X or YouTube. I'm going to middle-ground this thing hard and I'm going to start letting myself feel good about the sheer quantity of stuff I'm reading.
I'm going to start taking organized notes, probably just with markdown files in Neovim for now.
I'm going to start bookmarking things in Raindrop.
I'm going to start writing about the things I'm reading here, on Hey World. Even if I'm only shouting into the void, I'm going to at least start putting in the work to marshal my thoughts. (I'm typing this around midnight and it's a stream-of-consciousness mess.)
I'm going to let myself read more slowly. I'm not going to feel guilty about reading non-book things, which means I won't feel this uneasy compulsion to furtively rush through a blog post, because I'm scared someone will burst in the door, yelling, "Aha! Why aren't you reading a book you cretin?"
This has been a long time in the works, but I think it's the right step. Maybe I can find ways to optimize my reading a little more, since I don't have to let it be a dirty secret or shameful tradeoff anymore. Books will always be irreplaceable to me, but it's time to give digital media some proper consideration.