[aw9f70gae]

I was never a reader. I’ve played video games since I was a child, for over twenty years, and social media for almost as long.

I wonder how much harder it will be to develop mental patience and critical reasoning as someone who has never known what it’s like to slow down and enjoy the thought process of reading a book.

I have never not felt like my mind’s going 100mph

[jmfldn]

It will be hard but by no means impossible. Your brain is trainable in the same way, that your body is when you exercise. I'm by no means unaffected by all this, but being 40+, I experienced my entire pre-adult life without the Web or with a very different form of it at least.

I highly recommend making the effort to slow your mind. My brain works best when relaxed, not multitasking / not too many "tabs" open. I find that the best ideas come to me when I'm not even thinking and grinding the cogs of my conscious mind at least. I'm not sure what's going on but when the mind gets quiet, ideas and insights bubble to the surface. I guess the background processing (of which most of the brain is I guess) somehow has a chance to emerge.

Apart from this, I find it a much more satisfying state of mind to inhabit. It feels like relaxed contentment, not anxious and dissatisifed grasping at a million things underpinned by FOMO that I need the next bit of info / distraction. Don't get me wrong though, I get days when I fall down the hole of distraction too. I'm just really trying to hang on to what I developed many years ago. These days you have to actively cultivate this, whereas it came more naturally in the past.

[pm90]

Honestly reading is just a skill; like any others you get better at it with time.

My intro to reading for fun was via comic books: I got bored really easily reading regular books. The next step was reading Harry Potter series, which I found incredibly immersive and enjoyable.

I guess my advice would be to try things you might like rather than what are considered to be important or classics. If there’s something that piques your interest, reading is almost like an adventure, trying to get to the end to know the full story.