Adrift in the Endless Scroll – Until a Small Ritual Renewed My Love for Reading

When I was a child, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. Once my exams came around, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep concentration fade into endless browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual conversation – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d spend a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never use “eidolon” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling element to it – it acts as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my phone and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its integrated dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the missing puzzle piece that snaps the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a tool for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last waking up again.