How to Read in the Age of Distraction

I used to finish books. Not just occasionally, but reliably. A book would come into my life and I would read it, beginning to end, over however many days it took. The relationship between reader and book was straightforward: you opened it, you kept opening it, eventually it was done.

That changed sometime in the last decade. Now books pile up, half-read. I start with genuine enthusiasm, read for twenty minutes, feel the pull toward something else, anything else, and set it down. Sometimes I never pick it up again. The unfinished books accumulate like a quiet accusation.

This isn't a moral failure. It's an adaptation. My brain has been trained, by thousands of hours of internet use, to expect frequent novelty and immediate reward. A book asks for something different: sustained attention over long stretches, deferred gratification, tolerance for difficulty. These are skills, and skills atrophy when you don't use them.

What We're Losing

The ability to read deeply isn't just about enjoying novels. It's about a particular mode of thinking that only happens when you stay with something long enough to let it change you.

When you skim, you extract information. When you read deeply, you undergo something. The argument unfolds in your mind. You argue back. You notice what the writer assumes. You follow tangents of your own. You connect what you're reading to things you've read before. This is what it means to actually think about something, rather than just react to it. Researchers call this the difference between deep attention and hyper attention.

The internet rewards hyper attention. Quick pattern recognition, rapid switching, shallow processing of many inputs. That's fine for certain tasks. But if it's the only mode you have, you become incapable of thinking thoughts that take time to develop.

Tell me more about cognitive trade-offs

The Problem With Reading on Screens

I've tried. Kindle, iPad, various apps. The words are there. The experience is not the same.

Part of it is the device itself. A screen that can show you anything is always suggesting that it could show you something else. The book app is one tap away from email, which is one tap away from the entire internet. The possibility of escape is always visible, even when you don't take it.

Part of it is the way we've learned to read on screens. Web pages are designed to be scanned, not read. Headlines, bullet points, bold text, links that beckon you away. Years of this training shape how you approach any text on a screen, even a book. You start skimming before you realize you're doing it.

Physical books solve these problems not because paper is magical, but because it's limited. A book can only show you one thing: itself. There's nowhere else to go. The constraint is the feature. Sometimes limitation is what enables depth.

The Practice

Here's what actually works for me. I'm not claiming it's the only way, just that it's a way.

First: read physical books for anything you want to think about. Screens are fine for information extraction, terrible for contemplation. If a book matters to you, get the paper version.

Second: create conditions where the book is the most interesting thing available. This usually means leaving the phone in another room, not just face-down on the table. The friction of having to get up to check it changes the calculation. Most impulses to switch tasks pass in about thirty seconds. You just need thirty seconds of inconvenience.

Third: read at the same time every day, if you can. Morning works for me, before the day's inputs have cluttered my mind. But any time works if it's consistent. The habit of reading becomes easier when your brain knows what to expect.

Fourth: give yourself permission to abandon books. This sounds counterproductive, but it isn't. The guilt of unfinished books is often what makes you avoid reading altogether. If a book isn't working after fifty pages, let it go. There are more books than you will ever read. Find one that holds you.

Fifth: reread things. This is the real secret. The anxiety to always be reading something new is the same novelty-seeking that makes deep reading hard in the first place. When you reread a book you love, you already know the plot. There's nothing to extract. You can only go deeper.

Why It Matters

You could argue that deep reading is becoming obsolete. That AI will summarize any book for you. That information is what matters, and you can get information faster through other means.

This misunderstands what reading is for. The point was never just to move information from the page into your head. The point was to spend time in a particular mode of attention where certain kinds of thinking become possible.

Some ideas only arrive when you're patient. Some connections only form when you're not rushing. Some changes to how you see the world only happen when you spend hours in someone else's vision, without escape routes. This is what deep reading provides. It's not content. It's a practice.

And the practice is under threat. Not because anyone is banning books, but because the competition for your attention has become so intense that anything requiring sustained focus feels increasingly impossible. The attention economy is winning, and reading is one of its casualties.

A Different Relationship to Time

Deep reading requires accepting that some things take as long as they take. There's no way to read War and Peace quickly and still get what it offers. The experience is inseparable from the duration. Rush through it and you've done something different, something lesser.

This is inconvenient in a culture that treats efficiency as the highest value. But some of the best things in life don't compress. Friendship. Learning an instrument. Developing a skill. Falling in love. These all require time spent without worrying whether the time could be spent better elsewhere.

Reading is like that. The book takes how long it takes. Your job is to show up, repeatedly, and let it work on you.

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I finished a book last week. It took me three months, which is longer than it used to take, but it's done. I remember what it argued. I have opinions about where it's wrong. It changed something in how I think about its subject.

That wouldn't have happened if I'd read the summary.