Is It Worth Reading if It Isn’t Tweet-Worthy?

The other day I had a thought that could apply to many of us:

Most people started off reading books, made their way to articles, and ended up at tweets and headlines.

Is this how the devolution of human thought begins?

Before you think I am accusing you of anything, I can admit that to some extent I have gotten into this pattern myself. I still read books, but I do find myself scrolling through headlines to get the gist of what is goinkg on. Partly, this is due to the fact that so many apps encourage this. Facebook, Twitter, Google News, Reddit (and probably loads of other apps and social media) are all organized as never-ending feeds.

You can scroll down to your heart’s content, and never reach the end. This is a bottomless well of information and entertainment. Rather than needing to click or select anything, you can keep scrolling down. It’s comforting, like a friend who is always there for you.

You may not even feel the need to actually read the articles, as the headlines may tell you all that you felt you needed to know. You can feel like you know so much, while actually knowing so little. You get dopamine bursts as you continue to scroll down, learning more and more, about less and less.

When it comes to these apps, tomorrow’s posts will probably contradict today’s posts, but tomorrow is another day, and so we are not worried about that for now. Even if there is no contradiction, tomorrow’s posts will continue along a path with many twists and turns, as if a never-ending soap opera. Since the drama is never-ending, there is no need to really dig deep. You can ride along the surface, scrolling down mindlessly, endlessly, in a loop, day after day.

When someone asks what you’re doing. There Is no longer a need to say that you are on a particular app, as they mostly function in the same way.

When they ask what you are up to, you can respond:

“I’m just scrolling.”

f you are about to scroll, and you haven’t yet begun, you might say:

“I’m going for a scroll.”

I admit maybe I’m being alarmist (and facetious), but sometimes I wonder if we are scrolling our minds away.

When I lived in Paris, I recall crossing a crowded street with pedestrians, and most people had their phones out. Loads of people proceeded to bump into each other like bumper cars, not saying anything, not acknowledging what had just happened. They kept moving along, kept staring down at their phones. Were they on GPS? To cross the street – seems dubious. Were some of them scrolling? Probably. (In defense of the French, many of these people were probably tourists – and of course, this could happen anywhere.)

Often when I am on Facebook, someone may post an article, and then there is a flood of comments, outraged at the premise of the article. Inevitably, multiple people comment that no one actually read the article. The article apparently did not state what people thought it would claim. People have gotten angry, outraged, attacked the author’s competence, sometimes even taking the dramatic action of “unfriending” some of their long-time “friends” over a petty disagreement about this article, all the while not having actually read the article.

Many of us don’t want to take the time to read and learn. We want to form an opinion and spread it, even if this is just based on a headline’s worth of information.

And we now know headlines are designed to get you to click.

Then if you manage to click, most of us expect a list (e.g., 5 Steps to…) or some quick way to scan the material.

This could make sense to make the reading process more efficient – but it seems like scanning has become a way of life. Sometimes I am having a conversation with someone, and it looks like they are scanning for something better to come their way. Similarly with reading, if we can’t absorb the material in seconds, we become impatient. Rather than us needing to work harder to understand, we tend to blame the material as not being Tweet-worthy enough. Are we at the point of needing catchy headlines and convenient bullet lists, otherwise we can’t read and understand? If so, this is quite the devolution in our comprehension abilities.

Just yesterday, I had a dream or a vision. I thought – What if people read? What if they didn’t keep scrolling? What if they not only read but what if they actually found something worth reading? What if they actually desired to learn and understand first instead of wanting to spread their ill-formed and baseless opinions?

And then I woke up, and instead of dreaming, I decided to write this post.

5 Steps to Reading Insightfully:

1.     Learn to read

We all think we know how to read, but maybe we don’t. Maybe we are stuck at reading in a basic way, not reading or thinking critically. Whatever you are used to reading, seek out material that challenges you more deeply to improve your reading skills, learn more, and deepen your understanding.

2.     Read to learn

Reading is one of the best ways to learn. You will exercise your thinking, logic, imagination, questioning, and problem-solving, all while learning new things. We can read for fun, but we should also read some books to learn.

3.     Learn to understand

When you learn, you will come to an understanding of life and the world. You will start to see and perceive more fully, more deeply. We shouldn’t learn to accumulate random facts but instead, aim to focus on facts that help us understand.

4.     Understand to form useful opinions

As you understand things on a deeper level, you will begin forming novel and useful opinions and think more critically. People may even start to come to you to see what you think about a topic. These useful opinions are your reward for having read and learned deeply. Many of us want to believe that our opinions are useful, but this isn't easy to accomplish without meeting the prior steps.

5.     Form useful opinions to enact meaningful change

Work on developing opinions that can help to change things for the better. This can be done in virtually any field, but in general, the idea is to help solve problems and help humanity, life, or the world somehow. At this stage, you are not the only one rewarded, but society itself is also gaining from your deep reading and thinking abilities.

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If you would like a guide to better reading, you may be interested in reading one of my books - The Insightful Reader: How to Learn Deeply & Attain Life-Changing Insights from Books

The Pursuit of Higher Understanding

Pursuing information and knowledge is good, but pursuing wisdom and understanding is better. The world we live in is overflowing with information. More and more websites, books, music, social media posts, shows, and so forth are being pumped out into the world day by day to absurd levels where we cannot keep up with it all. Even keeping up with one medium is quite difficult. There are too many books to read, too many shows to watch, and too much music to listen to.

Foolishly, many of us do aim to keep up with it. We feel that if we don't know some piece of information, then we will be left behind. At this point in human history, we have data that, to some extent, are immortal and indestructible. As with the cloud and internet, the data may live on forever. At the same time, the data is quite mortal because every time something new comes out, only moments later hundreds, or thousands, or more even newer and fresh productions are released, pushing the recently created ones out of our reach and out of our minds, deeper into our collective forgotten histories.

In this sense, Twitter seems to be a metaphor for our relationships with information. What is new becomes old almost immediately, goes out of reach, and then is forgotten. We are forever grasping for the new, but the new instantly becomes old. So our information and ideas always appear to be outdated.

Many of us are shouting louder and louder to bring attention to what we are doing, while people care less and less because there is so much new stuff out there all of the time. There are more and more bits of information floating around for us all to see and access, but most people lack direction and purpose for what we are supposed to do with this information. We mostly ignore the information, or it paralyzes us with fear, or we are perpetually talking about what is new and following the fads and trivializing this life. Still, either way, the information is either worthless or not properly utilized. We are silly in that we value this information so much that we are always chasing it.

For what? Knowledge without know-how is what? Awareness without action is what? Data without direction is what?

Ignorance. Futility. Emptiness.

We are hyper-connected and disconnected at the same time. We are so into our devices, always connected to the digital world but lost from the real world in front of us. The real world has become a mirage that seems less real than the digital world that we prefer to inhabit. That digital world makes us feel useful because we are addicted to information. We must know what new recipe our neighbor is trying out to impress her mother-in-law. We must know which asteroid is almost coming to hit the planet and end it all. We must know which major attack happened without cause. It just happened. We must know these things and yet can do nothing about them but grow more and more upset and discontent with this limited life we have.

The information is limitless, but we are limited in our time. We limit ourselves by focusing on the information itself as something to be valued, rather than what we will do with that information to make improvements. We must value true wisdom and understanding over the 0s and 1s of data and information. Wisdom and understanding transcend the information before it and will help us to rise and do something greater in this world.

How do we pursue wisdom and understanding? Daydream, write down our thoughts, start conversations with and listen to our elders, distance ourselves from the frenetic pace of modern life where everything must be done right away. We must be in a hurry and busy and worried, or we are not normal, and something is wrong with us. Be artistic, observe nature, people-watch, meditate, read from enlightened souls and classical works, and not just the new fad.

It is important that we not pursue trivial and temporary factoids and instead pursue practical knowledge that can have a true impact on our thoughts and actions. If we pursue enough of this kind of knowledge, it will lead to higher levels of wisdom and understanding.