The Grinding Read
Dear Reader,
As I noted in a postscript to “The Deep Read,” author Cal Newport mentions in his book's conclusion that he took his deep work too far. He found exhaustion even after modeling his idea of deep work. And this is because he found himself crossing over to the territory controlled by the grinding read.
A primary part of Newport’s goal was to avoid the grinding read, but it’s not surprising that he found it anyway, though it doesn’t appear that he ventured in too far. It’s not surprising because scheduled deep work, which is how Newport created it, is still scheduled. And the focus on productivity is still a focus on productivity, regardless if it’s framed by new parameters.
The grinding read often leaves damage. It is a grueling process with no end in sight. It’s the forcing of yourself into a read that you have no desire or energy to tackle. And it isn’t a single-sitting experience. A single day or week of grinding reading isn’t the same; they are faint introductions. The grinding read is nearer to a chronic illness than a momentary-though-painful exertion.
Baby Analogy
Students who find themselves in finals season at school will sometimes feel a small measure of the grinding read. There’s the accelerated study, the need to regurgitate information on an exam, the frustration of trying to turn research into an organized paper.
When I did a study abroad, I didn’t find myself in one of those exciting everybody-parties-in-order-to-participate-in-the-culture programs. Instead, I was in a rather hellish intensive-study program. And for various and sundry reasons I won’t discuss here, my particular program of study was probably the worst overall. (Not necessarily the hardest, as the philosophy kids might quibble with me there, but mine certainly neared the rigor of a philosophy course and doubled with more reading than any other program offered, sometimes by a ten-fold margin. There are no bonus points for choosing the hardest path, but, well, some of us are denser than others.)
What this meant for me—and even for many of those in less reading-intensive courses—was that by the end of the week, my eyes would be twitching and the muscles around my eyes spasming. It was… disturbing to say the least. One often wondered if the alteration was permanent.
As these were mere eight-week sprints, however, and youth abounded, at least most of us recovered. (I can’t speak for everyone, especially those who studied in other years.)
The grinding read takes those eight-week sprints, takes that college finals experience, and puts it on a seemingly endless cycle, or at least one beyond what the individual experiencing it can bodily sustain.
Enter the Grandmaster
In a fascinating piece titled “The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving,” Aishwarya Kumar chronicles a realm of chess you’d never have expected:
”As he's jogging, it's easy to mistake him for a soccer player. But he is not. This body he has put together is not an accident. Caruana is, in fact, an American grandmaster in chess, the No. 2 player in the world. His training partner, Chirila? A Romanian grandmaster. And they're doing it all to prepare for the physical demands of ... chess? Yes, chess.”
Seriously, give that piece a read.
The grinding read functions the same way of these chess grandmasters at work: there is a strain, there is the inability to sustain weight, there is the need to survive the unexpected and mostly unobserved bodily exertion. (Interestingly, this part of the grinding read can also be found in the deep read, so keep in mind, enterprising students and readers. The key difference is typically the duration of the grinding read—this sucker’s like the Energizer Bunny, but with the individual friendliness of Monty Python’s rabbit.)
Beyond the excellent parallels between grandmasters needing to account for the unexpected caloric burn of their mental focus, I do think the analogy of sports can be extended to the grinding read in a different way. Sometimes, the grinding read equates to what in sports can be overtraining injuries, overuse injuries, or both—and these injuries can be exacerbated by outside or underlying difficulties.
Overtraining is simply that: you need to chill out overall. Overuse is typically a repetitive stress injury: same motions over and over again. Thus, even switching up your reading can balance out the grinding read that relates to overuse. But many times the two are combined, and they do often mix with outside problems—a death in the family, a chronic illness, a lost job, a pressing deadline, and so on.
These, then, are aspects of the grinding read, haunting elements that flicker on the margins, catching most readers unawares.
No, It’s Not the Deep Read
The deep read can be ongoing. It can have quite the duration. It can be directed. But the deep read is life giving, it is inspiring. The deep read catches something human, salubrious, and warm.
The grinding read becomes inhuman, unhealthy, and cold.
The grinding essentially twists the deep read, offers a false copy of it. It’s not necessarily its mirror opposite. It’s more akin to what Mark Edmundson writes:
"If all you ask people to do is pay attention, they will almost inevitably rebel. Attention is an imprisoning of the mind. If you don’t put attention to a higher purpose—one associated with absorption—the mind will rebel and so will the heart."
In the grinding read the higher purpose is lost, or perhaps cannot even be found. And so heart and mind rebel. But the trick of the grinding read is that there is no escape, the rebellion is crushed. And so is the reader.
Hate-Reads on Parade
I know, I know—I still haven’t written a full piece on the hate-read. Getting there eventually.
For now, I’ll note this: while it might be possible to have a hate-read that is a deep read—I can think of occasions where I was in true enjoyment of the level to which I’d be able to trash a certain despicable piece—a continuous pipeline of them becomes degrading. And, by the way, I’m not certain a hate-read can be a deep read. I’m uneasy about that enjoyment. But the singular instances aside, a regular habit of hate-reads, however occasioned, turns swiftly into an agonizing experience. There is no joy; there is only the abyss.
To enjoy an endless parade of hate-reads I can’t help but think you’d have to be a wicked person. There’s no wholesome enjoyment of that experience. There just isn’t.
I mentioned Audrey Watters months ago in “The Timely Read” and while I won’t repeat most of that piece’s reflection on Watters’ value, this quote is completely relevant to today’s topic:
As background knowledge can be helpful in reading, if Watters’ tone and approach seem strident, it’s because she’s been on this beat for a decade. If she seems exhausted and dismissive, well, you would be too after hearing the same ed-tech marvels repackaged as novelty year-upon-year.
Audrey Watters is weary. So weary. She’s been doing grinding reads for a decade. And while she now has an MIT book deal to show for it, that isn’t her sole goal. She’d like to be able to stop reading these pieces; she’d like her work to have made some tangible difference.
(She has, in fact, had to stop reading these pieces for her own wellbeing. She just-can’t-even with them anymore. It’s literally the same stuff, every year. I should perhaps mention that it’s thanks to her that I stopped building in ed-tech. I had a pipeline ready ed-tech product, one that was irresistible to the ed-tech purchasing machine. [I had, in fact, sold multiple subscriptions to it from a literal napkin diagram.] And I shut it down largely because my reflection on Watters’ work reminded me of something I already knew to be true: millions earned by garbage metrics aren’t worth it. But the point is that were it not for Watters, another crappy ed-tech product would be in existence. For a sample size of one—and really, tens of thousands of students—she made a difference. Sadly, at this point, the state of my soul and the saving of those kids from one more “lifechanging” product that was really just a part of the psychometric machine is probably not enough to encourage her. After an agonizing turn in the grinding read, Watters is justifiably spent. It’ll take some time and some good news for her to bounce back.)
The QuotEd Saga
I won’t bore people with origin stories about (or the extensive research behind) the two educational apps I created once upon a time.
But I will observe this much, QuotEd Reading Comprehension, the flagship app, finished with 425 unique passages in it, between 20 and 100 words in length. Those quotes had to be self-contained and could not heavily distort the authors’ larger points in the works they were selected from.
Aside from needing to create the questions, answer choices, and explanations, I had to find those quotes. That meant that I averaged reading between 3 and 30 books a week for a year-and-a-half. That is not a typo. That is not an exaggeration. They were read, not skimmed. (You can’t find good quotes and know how they’re used contextually by skimming, not regularly.)
To read like that isn’t pleasant. It’s a hyper-focused blitz. When you finish, you often have a dull headache or worse. There’s nothing wrong with such reading for shorter durations. Indeed, some deep reads are of this nature. But long-term, the reps aren’t deep anymore; they are just another day of pain. We won’t discuss the caffeine intake I required or the number of baristas who knew me by first name.
When I added my science app to the mix, I also added to my reading load: now I had science essays and journals to scour for material—though in this case I was reading so that I could see what I might be able to understand well enough myself to both paraphrase and turn into material for students. Even though the premise and design of the app were ostensibly the same, my reading of the science essays and journals wasn’t the same, aside from the intensity of it.
I was, of course, teaching full time during all of this, which adds up to 80-100 hour weeks. So do I have personal experience with the grinding read? Well, all I can say is that I stopped adding questions to the reading comprehension app in 2013 or 2014, and I literally cannot write a question for it anymore. My brain straight-up breaks if I try. It’s possible I could somehow force the habit back upon myself, but aside from the fact that there’s no need to make that experiment, I’m not entirely sure I could get back into that mode. I definitely know that I won’t and can’t do reading of that nature for any generalized purpose again. (Yes, I can still scale up my reading, just not in such a diffuse mode. No one reads like that!)
So if you’ve wondered about the odds and ends found in the ongoing “Words from the Wise and Otherwise” series, most of those quotes on reading are fruits of those labors, though many that I’ve used so far were ones I never put into the app. My backstock of quotations was also extensive…
And with that, I think I’ll end this longer read before it itself feels like a pale glimmer of the grinding read.
To the nourishing reads,
Kreigh
P.S. There’s a piece that absolutely corresponds with today’s topic. It isn’t, nevertheless, the same. It’s its own thing, one from the same realm and indeed overlapping in places, but completely its own.
While I can’t fully equate any of my own experience with Joseph Keegin’s exquisite framing—it’s literally a must-read after you’ve read Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought for an assortment reasons—I can understand some of his description of alienation in “Wisdom That Is Woe.” After my own long journey through Walton and argumentation theory, and my more recent delving into Nassim Taleb’s writings and The Great Endarkenment, among other related texts, I can understand something of those frustrations when I read a different writer saying, “So, in sum, what Covid has demonstrated to me is that many of the ‘experts’ are even more obtuse than I had dared to imagine,” in a superb, one-liner stuffed interview on monopolies and, more broadly, economics—and there’s no one with whom I can calmly comment, “Of course!” because that insight requires an interdisciplinary reading list that neither my academic acquaintances nor my intellectual acquaintances have bothered with. Instead, I’d be stuck explaining my “Of course!” for a month so I don’t come off as a crank. And as I haven’t that month—and neither would they indulge me so—I’m left throwing my arms up and wondering what’s even the point of awareness. Why seek out some of my random ends of research?
I’ve been fortunate that such moments are rare for me, or I think I’d be squarely among those for whom wisdom is woe, if there’s any such wisdom I myself possess. (As my regular readers know, this is a doubtful proposition.)
As a reader, I like Keegin’s piece for another reason: he can gently find room for disagreement with a text that he finds wanting in certain respects. That is, he’s able to note things Zena Hitz doesn’t address without denigrating the worth of her work. Keegin’s approach to disagreement isn’t about civility: it’s simply a humble acceptance that he has another lens.
What I found unsurprising was that at least one philosopher whom I should admire but cannot for several enduring reasons was shocked about Keegin’s narrative. That philosopher had never imagined that the life of the mind can be alienating, can be ruining. Among the reasons I myself didn’t major in philosophy in undergrad was that I had observed two principal sets of philosophy majors: the quarrelsome little idgits and the morose Eeyores. That latter set connects to Keegin’s narrative quite well—though the Eeyores and Keegin’s examples are quite separable groups, however related. (I should mention that I later realized that there was much more diversity among philosophy readers than the two groups I had regularly encountered. But that that second group is so readily apparent speaks to the aforementioned philosopher’s lack of either observation or imagination.)
I do have one reservation of my own after reading Keegin’s reservations of Hitz’s book. A person can look to Tara Westover’s Educated if they want a long look at the alienation Keegin describes, though that isn’t the essence of that certainly non-depressing book; Jennifer Morton’s Moving Up without Losing Your Way is advertised as another academic-life parallel. (These aren’t perfect matches, however, for Keegin’s main focus.) Curiously, the oft-reviled Malcolm Gladwell has a story in Outliers: The Story of Success that describes the sort of alienation Keegin explores. I’ve long used that story with students to ask a question about communication: when is the burden of communication on the speaker and when is it on the hearer? Some people are just jerks. Are they alienated in the sense that Keegin describes, or are they alienating? And if they are alienating, is it always because there’s a mismatch of decorum and professional manners, or are they actually, simply, jerks?
This is the thing: I don’t think Keegin is wrong, nor his examples actually jerks whom he’s redefined as downtrodden outsiders. I think he’s chosen examples of people who are truly alienated. But I do think another category of disaffected intellectual exists—the unfriendly, never-wrong misanthrope.
Here’s another thing: I don’t know how to square this addition with Keegin’s account.
By this, I mean that while those separable categories exist, how they might ever apply to the human being in front of me is a much different matter! It’s too easy to assume everyone’s a jerk. It’s also easy to assume that it’s all just a misunderstanding and that jerks don’t exist. (Keegin doesn’t even remotely suggest this, to be clear.)
That’s among the reasons his essay is so worth the read. It’s a piece of practical philosophy that pushes your boundaries even if you think you’ve got them pretty well understood.