Adrift in the Infinite Scroll – Till a Small Practice Restored My Love for Reading

As a youngster, I consumed novels until my vision grew hazy. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into infinite browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a finger. Reading for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would research it and record it. Nothing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now covers almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to keep up. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my reading to a maddening speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like exhibits – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I find myself turning less often for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost component that locks the image into position.

In an era when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last waking up again.