Adrift in the Infinite Scroll – Till a Simple Ritual Renewed My Passion for Books

As a child, I devoured novels until my vision blurred. When my exams arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus fade into infinite browsing on my device. My attention span now contracts like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a modest vow: every time I came across a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a ongoing record kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you sound insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, documenting and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, superficial attention.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a diary, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the tube, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the person pressed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully scrolling through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – admired and catalogued but rarely used.

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

In an era when our gadgets drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is finally waking up again.