Accidental inspiration

I've been aware that I was spending more than than I wanted to on the internet for at least three years. One year ago, I wrote in my journal about wanting to spend less time on Reddit which is the only social media platform I use. But I didn't try anything to change this until about two weeks ago.

That's when I read the Blackbird Spyplane piece, This Life Gives You Nothing where the author talks about his struggle with internet addiction and how he started reading Proust every morning to try and reclaim his attention.

It's beautifully written and it provided me with a tiny burst of inspiration. I decided to start reading Within a Budding Grove by Proust, the second volume of In Search of Lost Time the next day as soon as I woke up. I bought the book in 2022 and I've been meaning to read it since the second half of 2023. I've started multiple times only to never get past 150 pages.

It's now been 15 days of daily reading. I get up, brush my teeth, boil some water, drink a cup of hibiscus tea and read for 20-30 minutes.

Altered states

Almost every reading session starts in a similar way. A few minutes of struggle with the first paragraph or two, a vague thought about how much or little I'm going to be able to read that day and then complete immersion - slowly working through words, ideas, endless sentences. Patiently reading and re-reading paragraphs until I understand at least a bit of what is being said. Comfortable with the notion that on some days I'm not going to read 10 pages, and that I might go days without the story moving forward because narrator is busy in digressions about people, places, ideas, art, music, and all kinds of experiences and memories.

My main goal behind going back to Search was to read the book and then because it's a hard book to read, at some vague point in the future use that discipline to help subdue the instinct to always look at my phone whenever I had a minute.

I had a vague sense of mental calm when I stopped reading on day one and just wanted to preserve that for a few hours. Those few hours have extended indefinitely so far. After ~500 consecutive days of spending at least a few minutes on Reddit, I haven't opened it once and it's not taken any direct effort. Once or twice, from habit, I've typed in the address and opened the homepage but I’ve closed the tab when I realized what I'd done without having read anything. Somehow the urge to scroll was dampened after 20 minutes of reading and has continued to get more and more muted.

Jonah described reading Proust as "captivatingly trippy". I did not take that literally. But now I believe there is some truth to it at least for me. Reading this kind of book seems to alter my state of mind, and this effect lasts long after I've finished reading for the day.

Stretching vs compressing time

I hated the feeling of planning to spend 5 minutes scrolling and then snapping out of it an hour later with no real sense of what I've been doing and uneasiness about the wasted time. The infinite scroll of any platform feels like a pacifier, soothing but ultimately harmful to our ability to pay real attention irrespective of the quality of the content.

In contrast, when I look at the time after reading deeply for a while I'm generally surprised by how little time has passed. And when I stop reading, it's a seamless transition to whatever I'm doing next.

So far this habit has been easy to maintain because I temporarily have the luxury of not working but I'm planning to stick to it most days if not everyday once life gets more busy.

And ...

A quote from the book about a popular author that the narrator becomes friends with.

He would say also, with a shy smile, of pages of his own for which someone else had expressed admiration: "I think it's more or less true, more or less accurate; it may be of some value perhaps," but he would say this simply from modesty, as a woman to who one has said that her dress or her daughter is beautiful replies, "It's comfortable," or "She's a good girl." But the instinct of the maker, the builder, was too deeply implanted in Bergotte for him not to be aware that the sole proof that he had built both usefully and truthfully lay in the pleasure that his work had given, to himself first of all and afterwards to his readers. Only many years later, when he longer had any talent, whenever he wrote anything with which he was not satisfied, in order not to have to suppress it, as he ought to have done, in order to be able to publish it, he would repeat, but to himself this time: "After all, it's more or less accurate it must be of some value to my country." So the phrase murmured long ago among his admirers by the crafty voice of modesty came in the end to be whispered in the secrecy of his heart by the uneasy tongue of pride. And the same words which had served Bergotte as a superfluous excuse for the excellence of his early works become as it were an ineffective consolation to him for the mediocrity of the last.