How to read a Book is a provocatively simple title for a book. It pokes fun at the assumption the reader has about what they are capable of. What do you mea, how to read a book, if I can read, how could I not know how to read a book? After a moments thought it might occur you that you could ask similarly provocative and profound questions such as How to look at a painting, How to go for a walk, How to read a sentence, or even How to have a thought. These things are not as easy as they seem.

I am concerned that in the modern world it is very easy to get caught in the trap of the info-hedonic treadmill. As someone with the perfect balance of curiosity, distractability and laziness I can look back and find that I have wasted hours, days, years(!) flittering from shiny one piece of advice or information to another, and another, and another, and another. Knowledge and experience of the world that is wide as the ocean and as not quite deep enough to form a single layer of water across the surface. The surface tension is too strong and ones knowledge pools up pathetically here and there.

How does one overcome this? One can completely disengage, but that also throws out the baby with the bathwater. There is a lot of alpha in that digital soup. It may be possible to live as a complete monk, but I don’t want to resort to that escape without trying to work with this thing first.

Instead, we should probably learn to develop a technique to deal with this. A proper way to inferface with this thing that can rip your brain apart if you let it. You have to use this tool. It’s here. It’s powerful. It’s not some intrinsically evil trinket that must be destroyed, but a primed nuclear weapon, that just wants to be used. There is no going back. We must develop a technique.

Nota bene: I got some of the ideas for this essay, or at least the inspiration for this essay, from the twitter user @Kartikayb77, and their great “little corner of the internet”. They reminded me again of the importance of putting yourself out THERE, out there in the world. Even if it’s a little corner of the internet and only for you. I will develop an anti-lurk mentality. Be an anti-lurker.