Reading is a pleasure I developed several decades ago, when at a fairly young age, I was commuting to and from work for around four hours per day, and needed something to occupy myself besides the music from my portable tape player.
I’d had a bad experience at school with English, and hadn’t really enjoyed the subjects and the methods of teaching, let alone the teachers themselves. It left me feeling that I was a little stupid and unable to read or write well for my age. I’d started reading long before school, but school did its best to knock that pleasure out of me. So I was glad to get back into reading during the train and two bus rides, morning and evening.
The Internet came along and bizarrely accomplished the same thing that the school teachers seemed to be paid to do. I started off buying books through the Internet, to eventually only reading on the Internet, forgoing a wealth of good works and learning opportunities in the process.
Over the last few years I have made a concerted effort to read more books. I always read a lot, but not structured books with a narrative or a story to tell. I was reading news articles, pithy (and ultimately, calorie-free) posts on a couple of social media sites.
But that changed a few years ago as I constantly had the feeling of being undernourished and hyper-needy for the ‘latest’ take on something that was ultimately useless for my life.
I still read a lot on the Internet, but I have carefully curated what when and how I read. I mostly read through my RSS reader, which brings the articles to me and formats them as I please, not as intended by the site that ruins the text with overly intrusive ads and other decals of surveillance. Although I make exceptions for crafted blogs that have a look and feel that is positively for the reader’s pleasure.
I can’t recommend enough the effort and the reward of doing this. Continue your (un)social media if you like, I’m not going to judge too hard, but seriously consider reading books and physical magazines in its place. You’ll feel much better for it.