A reductionist and selfish (?) view below but bear with me for a moment.
I read a lot online. It could be work-related, for studies, for learning something new. But the most common and ambiguous category of stuff I read is anything that is 'interesting' to me. This could be in the domains of current affairs, news, politics, religion, movements, technological advances, entertainment, psychology and many more. Do I learn something new through this? Sure. But for the most part this new learned entity is 'information'. I'm well-informed thanks to my reading. It doesn't imply I'm growing as a person because of it.
Indulging in this 'interesting' category also costs me a lot of money, I think.
How? I'm spending time on this reading business. Over a year, an average of an hour a day spent reading translates to 350+ hours. And this is a conservative estimate, also excluding additional time spent thinking about the stuff, talking about it, etc. That's close to two months of a full-time job. Instead, what if I had used at least some part of this time for learning a new skill or just earning money in a different way. Maybe I'd have finished reading 'The Intelligent Investor' in the past one year and started investing. Or performed freelancing tasks. Or set up a little business. Or monetized this blog.
Instead, my time and attention is going to an army of online writers and journalists. Since how much an article is read and shared, how many views and clicks it garnered is probably the primary metric for their paycheck and them keeping the job, I think I've been contributing to their (economic) bottom-line (I won't go into how well or poorly this breed is paid). So every time I read such an article, in a way I transfer some of my money to them. In this context, hate-reading would be especially painful. Why pay money to someone you dislike!
Suddenly, that urge to read about the latest political scandal or a supposedly incredible thing someone somewhere in the world did is dissipating.
Sure, there could be many non-tangible benefits of such reading. What I have to decide though is whether the cost is worth it. I don't think it is.
I read a lot online. It could be work-related, for studies, for learning something new. But the most common and ambiguous category of stuff I read is anything that is 'interesting' to me. This could be in the domains of current affairs, news, politics, religion, movements, technological advances, entertainment, psychology and many more. Do I learn something new through this? Sure. But for the most part this new learned entity is 'information'. I'm well-informed thanks to my reading. It doesn't imply I'm growing as a person because of it.
Indulging in this 'interesting' category also costs me a lot of money, I think.
How? I'm spending time on this reading business. Over a year, an average of an hour a day spent reading translates to 350+ hours. And this is a conservative estimate, also excluding additional time spent thinking about the stuff, talking about it, etc. That's close to two months of a full-time job. Instead, what if I had used at least some part of this time for learning a new skill or just earning money in a different way. Maybe I'd have finished reading 'The Intelligent Investor' in the past one year and started investing. Or performed freelancing tasks. Or set up a little business. Or monetized this blog.
Instead, my time and attention is going to an army of online writers and journalists. Since how much an article is read and shared, how many views and clicks it garnered is probably the primary metric for their paycheck and them keeping the job, I think I've been contributing to their (economic) bottom-line (I won't go into how well or poorly this breed is paid). So every time I read such an article, in a way I transfer some of my money to them. In this context, hate-reading would be especially painful. Why pay money to someone you dislike!
Suddenly, that urge to read about the latest political scandal or a supposedly incredible thing someone somewhere in the world did is dissipating.
Sure, there could be many non-tangible benefits of such reading. What I have to decide though is whether the cost is worth it. I don't think it is.
