Reading as a Form of Laziness

I remember a stretch of time last year when I was in a really good groove. Sleeping well, waking up early, and getting several hours of reading in before work—I ended up reading a whole bunch of random books.

That phase didn’t last long, but the feeling stuck with me. So whenever I fell into a slump, I’d tell myself: Go read something, anything. Reading something is always better than reading nothing.

“Reading something is always better than reading nothing”—that was my default mindset for a long time.

Soon enough, it crept into everything. Don’t feel like studying? Go read. Don’t want to practice a skill? Go read. Don’t feel like writing? Go read. Don’t want to dig into a hard problem? Go read.

In reality, though, most of that reading wasn’t focused at all. I’d flip through one book, skim another, and after half a month I’d still be stuck on the preface and the first chapter. The few things I did manage to read were quickly forgotten. There were passages that had moved me deeply at the time, but once enough time passed, I couldn’t even recall what that emotional resonance felt like.

Hiding behind the excuse that “reading is always good,” I dodged the hard stuff. I filled my life with shallow, mindless reading just to get a vague sense of accomplishment.

The brain naturally avoids anything demanding and gravitates toward what’s easy—which is just pure laziness.

It’s just like doomscrolling Douyin (TikTok). Infinite scrolling feels amazing, right up until you hit a wall of absolute boredom and finally snap out of it. I have a similar experience browsing Bilibili: I even catch myself fantasizing about stumbling onto so-called “knowledge,” giving myself the illusion of learning just to soothe the guilt afterward.

Bilibili isn’t quite as immersive, though; it’s fairly easy to hit that point of boredom.

I used to think reading was inherently virtuous. But after repeatedly snapping back to reality only to feel completely empty and lost, I realized that mindless, fragmented reading isn’t really any different from scrolling Douyin.

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Why do we start slacking off?

It really is human nature. If I had to describe this type of person, I’d just look in the mirror. You usually find it in someone who wants to learn, hoards piles of fragmented knowledge, knows every life lesson by heart, yet lacks any real professional craft. They love fiddling with note-taking tools, buy books like a landslide but read them thread by thread, write endless to-do lists, can’t design and can’t code—probably a product manager.

How do you break out of this? I think it probably comes down to a few things:

• Learn something hands-on
• Build something with your own hands
• Develop problem awareness

Split reading into two buckets: some of it is pure leisure, and some is problem-solving. When you start with a specific problem to solve, which book you pick up and how much of it you read suddenly doesn’t matter all that much.

I want to close with a Douban book review as a personal reminder—even if finding this quote was itself the product of passive, lazy reading:

Have a strong body and a bias for action; there’s no need to watch so many movies and read so much fiction (I finally realized that limited energy is better spent chewing on politics, economics, history, and philosophy…); develop your own ideas; collaborate with a team; less posing, more doing; underestimating the difficulty is daydreaming, overestimating it is just being a coward… — Herzog on Herzog

Finished: 2022-11-13 23:34:59