Deeper reading
Over the last month I've done a lot more reading. Partially because of my little X4 (and now the X4 Pro), and partially because I got back from a two week vacation in Italy.
During our trip I made the conscious decision to use my iPhone as little as I could stand, and carry around the e-reader to supplement my jittery desire for dopamine.
It mostly worked.
During the vacation I read several new Stephen King novels, as well as caught up on a long backlog of articles I'd saved.
It reminds me of Twitter for a decade ago. Scrolling through new articles, catching up on interesting thoughts, and then quickly swiping past outdated news. This deep reading, with intentionality, set into an app that cannot bug me with notifications or update requests—it's lovely. It reminds me picking up the newspaper each morning and reading till I'm done.
And, because of all this, ideas are starting to popup. Because I'm spending so much time pouring into interesting words from other people, I'm creating a space for my own brain to think and grow and formulate concepts together. Several of the posts that I read yesterday were on deep, meaningful topics, and they challenged me in different ways. One I'm going to have to come back to, debate how to handle it, and perhaps make some changes as a result.
This is what I want. Reading that challenges, changes, and inspires.
A funny thing happens when you have a device dedicated to just reading. On the iPhone you're always a swipe away from the hard stuff. You can quickly go over to Reddit or Hacker News. But on the X4 reader you're stuck. There's just this page and the next one. It's entirely linear. And so, as a result I've found myself reading hard things, going through articles that push me in ways I'd be tempted to save for later. Now, at this point, what I'm reading is the saved for later, and it's time to get to it.
You can't get that form of deep focus from LinkedIn, from most of X these days. All of those are engagement traps. Yes, reading long form posts can still be their own form of bait. But it doesn't tend to work that way. When someone shares their thoughts on a blog, they're not usually trying to work the algorithms. Instead they're speaking for themselves, writing something they'd like to read, writing for an audience that cares about what they have to say.
All that said, I've been working with a friend on an idea. Taking all these inputs and converting them into a method of deep reading that others might enjoy. It's still happening in the background, but I'll gladly share it as soon as it's ready. The main thing is, finding good sources of writing from people who care; and I think I've managed that with an OPML feed that includes over 400 sources.
Side note: I'd originally split up my sources of reading into tech, religion, and politics. Now I'm just blending them all together. I don't know if that makes sense long term, but it helps me a bit with the dopamine hit part of things—I don't know what's going to be next on the e-reader. All I can do is press the next button and see what pops in. The app I'm working on (an RSS reader) is designed to allow me to save anything I find interesting, then export those as an EPUB to the X4. It's still a bit of a manual process, but I think I can find some ways to automate it. If that happens I'll be able to use the iPhone to find interesting posts, during the times that I'm excited to check out the RSS Reader and pull to refresh—then bundle those together on a monthly or weekly basis, and send them off to the X4.
Second side note: Yesterday, while trying to write the previous article, I kept getting hammered by notifications on my Mac. That has me wanting to do what my friend Saadia suggested, and setup my backup X4 as a writing device. Over the next few days I'm going to try that and see if writing my first drafts on the X4 helps to avoid the distractions that happen on a Mac. I tried this years ago by buying a second Mac, but that was too expensive of a luxury, and my wife needed a laptop.