I Tried To Read A Book And Woooo Boy, My Brain Was NOT Happy About It
So here’s some truth: I’m hopelessly addicted to technology. This job, which I love, has fundamentally made me need to constantly be on my phone while on my laptop while watching TV. I’ve re-wired my DNA to always need to be using multiple forms of technology at the same time.
Most of this need to be constantly wired in from working under Dave Portnoy for the last 5+ years. As the 9th full time employee of Barstool, from day 1 I had the constant 24 hour a day fear of being fired if I missed a breaking story. It’s not like today when we have 9 trillion bloggers and Dave vacationing 4 months out of the year- back then he actually read his own website and cared what went up on it. If it wasn’t funny, he didn’t let it go up. If it was breaking down X’s and O’s of a game, he would email you and be like “what the fuck is this?” There were no blogs about the backup center for the Southern Indiana State basketball team. Different times, my friends. Different times.
But because of this fear of Portnoy instilled in me since I was 24 years old, I’ve become unable to relax for an extended period of time. Sitting in the movies gives me anxiety- for what if Colt McCoy does something and I’m not there to blog it? Vacation? Never heard of it. I took a Sunday off during football season to go to my Grandma’s gravesite and got mocked for it by a coworker.
This year, having just turned 30 on October 10 (10/10, much like my looks), I decided a few things.
1) I’d like to travel a little more (I actually said that last year too, but I swear I’m going to go somewhere besides Vegas this year)
2) I’d like to work out a bit more (Again, said that last year, but I actually signed up for a gym and have been going so that’s a good start) (Right now it’s Wednesday and I haven’t been since last Monday but that’s ok, baby steps)
3) I’d like to spend a little more time off my phone and read a few more books.
Let’s focus on number 3. I’m not proud of this, but since being hired on October 7th, 2013, I have not read a book. I cannot recall when the last time I read a book before that was, but I think it was the last Hunger Games book. I mean I hope I read something after that…I think I might have read something that I just can’t remember around 2012 or so, but even if I did, that would mean I’ve gone 7 years without reading a full book, cover to cover. Downright depressing. Embarrassing to type that, really. Actually as I typed that, I remembered I re-read The Great Gatsby in 2013, before I was hired. So yeah, around Summer of 2013 was the last time. Not great!
Last Saturday, I decided enough was enough and decided to try and read again. Maybe a little each night, read for, gasp, pleasure. Not because my English teacher is making me, but because it fulfills the mind. Because a good book is actually awesome if you are really into it. And because I don’t want my brain to rot. I told Keith that I wanted to read more (he reads a lot of books and is quite handsome and his DMs are open, ladies) so he brought me a few different books to dive into. Ironically enough, one of them was called “Amusing Ourselves To Death”, which is a book about how entertainment and technology is sort of ruining our lives and society around us. From Wikipedia:
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book’s origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell’s work, where they were oppressed by state control.
It’s fascinating to me because I’ve had discussions about how 30 or so years ago, the news was the word. People gathered around their televisions to watch Tom Brokaw and were genuinely concerned citizens. Nowadays, it’s so bizarre to me how little we just…care. About basically anything. The news cycle moves so fast and we are so desensitized. I often think about the Las Vegas shooting for example- 59 people at a concert were murdered and 851 were hurt, and the news moved on in a matter of a couple of days. But when I think about Columbine, I was in 5th grade when it happened, it was front page news for weeks. It controlled the airwaves. Now? We barely blink. Love Trump, hate him, or indifference, you have to admit if what is going on in our world right now happened before the age of social media, ridiculous 24 hour news channels pushing agendas, and everyone having the attention spans of a goldfish, people would probably care way, wayyyy more about what’s going on in the White House than if a football player took a knee. I mean I’m getting away from my point but it truly fascinates me.
As much as the book interested me and as well written as it is, I found myself struggling to read it. Not because I didn’t know the words, but because I found myself reading a book the same way we are all programmed to read the Internet- skimming, scanning, jumping ahead, and wanting to be stimulated by the next thing before I was even done with what I was supposed to be focused on. Multiple times in the span of reading 10 pages I had to stop and really focus on focussing. I had to try to tell my brain to slow down and chill out and just read the words in front of my eyes. It was much, much more difficult than I imagined it would be.
And then of course, the caveat of the entire book reading problem- phone anxiety. The entire time wanting to check my phone, scroll Twitter, see if I missed anything. It’s actually wild how much I wanted to do that. I was ashamed of my brain. But there’s that fleeting feeling at all times “what if this is the time you decide not to look at your phone and something is actually happening?” It’s so, so hard to push that feeling away and just read. Can you imagine if RG3 signed a new deal and I was reading? I’d never forgive myself…shit I’d never forgive Gutenberg.
So I’m going to work on it. Little by little. Chapter by chapter. I’m going to re-wire my DNA to be able to live without my phone for like, a half hour a day. Maybe even an hour on Sunday now that we don’t have football anymore. I can put off re-watching The Office every night to read a chapter of a book instead. That doesn’t sound too impossible.
It won’t be easy. And realistically I’ll probably read for 10 minutes, check my phone, read for 5 minutes, check my phone, etc etc. But god dammit I will read a book this year if it’s the last thing I do. Any suggestions?