My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span
Books are slow and often teeming with filler content. Audiobooks are even slower than books and practically painfully so. When I had to paint walls for few hours I initially listened to audiobook but it was tortuous. My own thoughts are more interesting and less of a slog than a book read at that pace. Audiobook feels like my brain is shoved into a tarpit and held there foricbly.<p>It&#x27;s really no wonder that your brain rejects all that when it tasted variety of information delivered at much higher speeds.<p>I don&#x27;t think I wouldn&#x27;t be able to focus on textbook for mathematical analysis that&#x27;s so dense that reading two pages takes an hour ... but books filled with so so many words that were just excercise in language use for the author and carry barely any information? Mostly, no thank you. It&#x27;s not a problem of focus. It&#x27;s a problem of rising standards on what feels interesting.<p>Even the author of this essey admits he had no trouble reading a book when he finally found one that was actually interesting for him (because he felt it was about him and his self-percieved plight).