I love books, and I love audio books, and honestly, I think they may be the only force of good left in the world (or at least the key to our salvation)
I never got swept up in social media, but I did succumb to the mind-numbing habit of Doom Scrolling through miles of inane content with little more value than a few seconds of distraction and isolated humor. The result (though I wasn't aware of it) was that my attention span diminished drastically. I found that I actually struggled to get through articles, especially long ones, and books where literally putting me to sleep within the first several pages because it took so much concentration to keep my mind on task.
As a former voracious reader who once took stacks of books home from the library and read every one of them, this reality was not only startling, but also deeply unsettling to my core identity.
I was a reader who couldn't apparently read.
Tolkien has been my path back towards reading and longform concentration. I started with the Silmarillion. In retrospect, that was probably a kind of torture. The Silmarillion reads a bit more like the Bible than a novel. I struggled to get through the text and eventually decided to employ the use of an audiobook to read along to.
If anyone is wondering, Andy Serkis narrates The Silmarillion, and it's epic and gorgeous and amazing.
It also kept me going through the text, with the added benefit of not having to look up pronunciations.
After The Silmarillion, I read The Hobbit (which was much easier), and now I'm onto The Fellowship of The Ring, and that is easier still.
I can read for longer, hold concentration for longer, and retain information better than I could before.
Between The Silmarillion and The Hobbit, I have given up watching YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels (I was never cool enough for TikTok) and only watch (or listen) to longform YouTube videos or audiobooks.
Yesterday, I was listening to a narration of Marcus Aurelius' Meditations while I worked, and it struck me how valuable a resource audiobooks and literature in general are.
With social media taking over, shortening our attention spans, ruining our ability to rationalize information as sensationalism manages to strike our emotions first and our intellect last; these books are the quiet sentinels calling us back to ourselves.
It seems crazy today, with hundreds of hours of content flooding our digital worlds every minute, all tailored to our biases and prejudices so as to destroy any hope of differing people seeing eye-to-eye, that we could sit down with a book on a single subject, or story, diligently written by a single person over the course of hundreds or thousands of hours. Because the author cared about what was put on the page far beyond the number of eyes that would see it, or how much attention it would garner. Creativity for the purpose of creation rather than attention, kudos, or fame.
As social media spins out of control, shaping our information landscape and worldviews, isn't it time we uninstall our apps and pick up our books again? Trade inflammatory hot-takes for well-researched explanations and explorations? Forget being #relatable and accept being authentic even if we're not aesthetic?
This post was too long and will likely not be read, but I felt like putting these words out there all the same.
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