Carlos Collazo

On Reading More & Scrolling Less

I've been wanting to get some words down on the blog about how I've been reading more thanks to better habits with social media. Will Leitch's newsletter today served as a nice catalyst.

In it he laments that facts that he reads fewer books than he'd like to, and also that everyone else—especially in the younger generations—seems to be reading less as well:

The first thing I, and just about everyone I knew, did when we went to someone’s home or apartment for the first time was look at their bookshelf. It was a way to get an immediate shorthand for what they cared about, how they saw their place in the world, where they came from—who they were. (I once saw The Game on a good friend’s shelf and never saw him the same afterward.) Books were integral to your identity. They were how you filtered the world, and, in many ways, how the world filtered you.

It is, fair to say, not like this anymore. This is not to say books are not still being read. They are: They even let people like me keep writing them, after all. But two things seem to have changed dramatically in the last 10 years.

I grew up a pretty voracious reader, I think.

My mom was a teacher who encouraged me to read and write, and I was surrounded by enough family members who liked books as well. One year for my birthday my parents got me a kindle. For either of my two brothers, I'm guessing that would have been a pretty lame gift. For me it was awesome. I've always liked to read. As a professional writer, that's probably unsurprising.

But I definitely got into a rut for a few years where I looked up and realized I just... wasn't reading that many books any more.

Sure, I was reading something basically everyday.

But it was definitely more of the ephemeral slop of the internet that's so easy to get suckered into scrolling through. It wasn't much that was intentional or lasting. Twitter was a consistent second screen for me throughout the day, and when I was bored I'd just flip open the timeline to see what was going on.

If my Storygraph account is to be trusted, I started to get out of that rut sometime around 2022. That year I read Deep Work by Cal Newport. I started to be a lot more intentional with my time, and started to pull back more from social media—and from Twitter in particular.

Prior to 2022 I was probably lucky to have read five (?) books per year or so in my post-college years. Since I started tracking my reads in 2022, this is the number of books I've read per year:

I don't think it's at all a surprise that my uptick in books read has come with a significant decrease in social media usage. I tried to download my Twitter data to see exactly how my usage of the app has changed in this period of time, but couldn't figure out an easy way to do that. Still, I'm pretty confident I use it far less now than I used to.

I don't have any of the social apps on my phone. If I'm ever bored or want to kill time, it's so easy to just grab the kindle and read an interesting book. I no longer doom scroll before bed or immediately after I wake up.1

Last month I read a book called The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen. It's about the habits and virtues that the founders strove for. Basically all of them read a ton. Every single day.

This section from the book stuck out to me immediately, and resonates even more now:

“The way for citizens to create a more perfect union, the founders insisted, was to govern themselves in private as well as in public. Cultivating the same personal deliberation, moderation and harmony in our own minds that we strive to maintain in the constitution of the state.

“Madison would have urged us to think more and tweet less.”

That's great advice.

I'll amend it to this: we should all read more and scroll less.

  1. I do, however, still burn a significant amount of time with YouTube. But hey, one bad habit at a time.↩

#blogs #productivity #reading