Reading

So, reading. It's something I grew up loving. I used to spend every waking moment with my head stuck in a book. Everything from software development to high fantasy to memoirs. This began when I was very young, my parents used to read to me every night before bed and my dad promised me that whenever we went to a bookstore, he'd buy me whatever I wanted to read as long as I kept reading. Of course, at that time, it seemed like he'd just given me the keys to the candy store and he pretty much did.

From then on, I was a "reader". It always amazed me when I talked to someone that didn't read. I always thought in my head that they must have a very boring life and I was always very close to labeling them "stupid".

All that changed a few years ago and, to be honest, I'm still not sure what really happened. I feel like it started around the same time I got a smartphone. Now I could read short blogs, tweets, page-long articles, wherever I wanted for free. Fast forward a couple of years and I still buy paper books but I don't read them as often. I've gone from reading books several hours every day to reading maybe once a week for an hour if I'm lucky.

I hate it.

I hate the fact that I'd rather look at a screen than feel the pages of a book in my hand, smell the paper and ink, visit old friends between those pages.

I hate that I've gone from being a "reader" to being a "dumb" smartphone user. To becoming one of the people that I couldn't understand when I was younger.

I hate it and I'm going to change it.

I'm not sure what that looks like. I've been seriously considering a kindle paperwhite lately. Mostly because it feels like a bridge back to reading what I used to love, books. On my phone I primarily read blogs, hacker news, facebook, twitter, very short form things and I've found over the past year or so that I'm almost unable to keep my attention focused on anything longer. At least with a kindle I can switch between stories as I'm reading and "stretch" my attention span back out.

It's difficult to extend my own personal experience to the general population at large, but I do feel that children and adults both have shorter attention spans. Both due to the massive amount of information we're expected to consume and retain on a daily basis and to the massive amount of information we CAN consume at a moment's notice.

Will my experiment to change myself work? I guess we'll see in a few months.