Breaking out of a Reading Slump during an Pandemic
On a very uneventful Sunday morning in April, I was cleaning out my TV Drawer when I stumbled upon my Kindle. My 5 year old Kindle Fire, with amazing graphics and a horrible battery. I spent the next hour going through my old book collection and had a slow feeling of guilt wash over me when I saw the amount of unread books there. But that feeling didn’t quite last as I went onto the Amazon store and brought a dozen more.
This has always been the case for me when it comes to content in any form. I save away books, add movies and shows to my watch list and bookmark articles that have interesting premises. To me it presents a feeling of being organized in a chaotic world that has too much of good content floating around. But at this point of time in the world, the idea of content has gone through a massive shift with Instagram, Twitter, and what not. With these mediums coming up with the idea of a feed, that would show personalized content that was just made for you, the effort to go search for things is not needed. Now people mostly watch stuff on their feed, share it and because there’s so much on your feed, you tend to spend more time on it
Even with the OTT platforms and YouTube, there is a personalized feed that pops up and people tend to refer to that mostly. It’s crazy how involuntary that action has become, where in you just click on something that pops up on your home screen.
There is this YouTube channel called College Humor that did an interesting take on this. On their Facebook page, they put out a video titled, “I dare you to watch this”. The whole video was just one person talking to the camera asking the people watching this, to complete the whole thing and to ignore their instinct to scroll. 2 minutes into the video, I could feel an intense pressure out of nowhere to just end the video and go on scrolling. That’s when it hit me that this was a break in the pattern i.e. the continuous scrolling and pausing by each post for 30 seconds.
With the pandemic raging around us, a lot of us are online for various reasons and just endlessly scrolling through Instagram or twitter is the norm. There is no meeting people anymore, so the phone becomes our portal. And its also a fact, we are over bundled with information on a daily basis. So its not uncommon to feel numb after an hour of scrolling through Instagram.
In an effort to rid myself of all the distractions, I put my phone away and deleted all social media apps except WhatsApp to avoid the convenience of opening the apps with one simple click. Next, I opened a book on my Kindle and just started to read.
At the beginning it seemed like the worst idea ever. All I could think about what memes I was missing, what trends I missed, and all the DM’s about my incredibly funny story that I posted. Its funny how your mind starts to justify things during an addiction. Like all I could think were excuses like “Oh I’ll just install it to check my messages, my friends will think it’s rude if I don’t reply to messages” or I’ll just open it for 15 minutes while I wait for this person to return my call.
None of those reasons were valid however, it was just attempts to go back to the Pattern. But at the same time, one reason I kept redirecting my mind to was the clarity that being off your phone would bring me, and the relief of crossing off a few books off my list.
At the beginning, I started small with reading 20 pages everyday. Post the 20 pages, I would sit and think about what I read and just sit with that feeling for a bit. The trick was to avoid jumping on Instagram right after reading, because again that would create a pattern of reading fast, thinking all about how I’d be using Instagram after that. I’ve never smoked a cigarette in my life, but at the moment I related to some of my chain-smoker colleagues that would reward themselves with a cigarette after 1–2 hours of working.
Part of what helped me get back into reading was also the book. I started this absolutely beautiful book called “Elanor Oliphant is Completely Fine” . The book was about this woman called Elanor who lives in Dublin all alone in a flat. She works at an accounting firm, and most of her life, she’s been alone and she’s convinced herself to be okay with it. What changes however, is when she finds herself in love with someone and when she ends up making friends with one more person, Raymond. The way this book has been written is absolutely beautiful and it addresses the root of what makes human existence beautiful aka love, friendship, experiences. The author argues that even though the world right now allows us to exist without opening yourself to none of those, its recommended that you do.
Reading books for me, as a child was often to distract myself from some of the situations I found myself in. Before I was 10 years old, I had 3 operations, one painful skin disease and multiple days of pain. Reading transported me into worlds the author created for me and go on a journey with these characters. As Sheldon Cooper rightly puts it, the world’s strongest graphic chip is your imagination. With the pandemic raging on and a heap of uncertainty around, a little journey with a really nice book wouldn’t hurt would it?
