Why We Struggle To Finish Books - The Digital Gap

hi welcome back and i am back in university and with a major with a degree with a buttload of schoolwork also comes the responsibility of having to dig through a buttload of books it's really self-evident at this point however the problem is that tell me if this sounds like you a course assigns you an extremely long book you know i don't care if you're studying philosophy or literature or sociology or whatever whatever the course is that requires a lot of reading and you're sitting here you're thinking to yourself i should read this i should finish this as soon as possible or if you're not at university you simply just want to finish something like i don't know don quixote or war and peace sit down and you think to yourself i have to finish this this is a duty of mine this is my mission to acquire the bragging rights to brag about this book at the dinner table and then what tends to happen is that the first hundred pages more or less okay but then once you venture over the halfway mark of the book you lose interest you start second guessing yourself in terms of like you know is the book really worth it should i really spend so much time on this book or should i just simply abandon it that is the problem that we're trying to address today on this video why is the case that we as human beings inhabiting the 21st century why is the case that it is so easy for us to lose interest and i know for a very very blanket answer it simply is you know technology is changing the way that we interact with the world the ways that we engage with information all around us and i think from that front you're completely correct you know with the development of film with the development of streaming services and social media the way that we process information it just basically changed completely in the course of 100 years now with technology now with shows now with different forms of art we were in a sense programmed to react to instant should i say bursts of very short and very sharp and very simple information people no longer read long-winded books on a certain subject you know books are in a sense the last thing that you turn to for information first line of defense internet blocks second line of defense you read a longer blog third line of defense maybe the blog recommends book and then you're like okay i have to get the book and read it now with time and with all of these technological changes we've basically programmed ourselves into these machines that are really really really good at processing rapid bits of data even in university the modules were presented in very short kind of like you know 10 page papers or 20 page papers whereas before as i've heard from some of my professors you were literally assigned a book a week and that was like the expected reading volume that you that you were expected to expect to fulfill and in the course of navigating through this lack of focus should i say i've tried so many things meditation tried drinking coffee before i read tried you know hooking myself up with sugar when i'm reading i've reached the conclusion that if you really want to keep going if you really want to finish should i say a really difficult book such as this one you in a sense have to change how you think about um the medium of reading how you think about you know reading as an activity and as should i say uh a form of information technology we're talking about films netflix or text messages or social media posts they were designed to capture your attention for example this video is relatively short because i want to deliver to you as much as possible in a span of five minutes this right here is the bulk of our diet when it comes down to in taking information news articles are extremely succinct short to the point journalism its entire job is to condense a major event down to some digestible chunks so if you have a million buzzing flies buzzing around you feeding you little bits of information that's in a sense going to change how you react to information in general so when you sit down to read a book your brain's first instinct is to revert back to that sort of bursts short bursts of information and that in a sense is why when you sit down to read a book you tend to lose interest after reading 20 pages we're not posing any more on judgments here we're not saying that if you couldn't read 100 pages in a sitting then you're a bad human being we're just simply saying that this is what we're up against if we want to become readers in the 21st century a more depressing note in walter benjamin's paper the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction he actually coined contemplation as a form of asocial behavior which makes a lot of sense on the surface because book people tend to be some of the most reserved and introverted people ever but it's the way that we react to books that really needs to be reconfigured in this present day and day and age because so many people jump into a large book with the wrong kind of expectations they are constantly expecting that sort of big bursts of excitement big bursts of information in a short window of time not realizing that books that were older books that were longer books that are probably a little more profound than the usual commercial fiction they tend to have a very long lead up they tend to have certain things that you have to look for you tend to have to plow through a bunch of crap before you can get to the good parts in the other videos i might have talked about the concept of like you should quit a book if you find it boring but now i think i'm gonna have to rethink that entire thing because after plowing through so much difficult university reading i feel like you shouldn't really trust your intuition in this case when it comes down to digging through a long and difficult book sometimes it is going to be boring sometimes it is going to take a while sometimes it is going to completely the ending part of a really difficult piece of work it will indeed change your life and now the evaluation of whether you should quit a book once it gets boring it gets more nuanced and more complicated you not only have to judge how much you're interested in the book you also have to judge the value that this piece of literature could potentially bring you so in a sense you have to keep two contradictory ideas in mind because certain parts of the book are gonna make you feel like hey i'm wasting my time here what's the point of even reading this big mammoth but another part of you sort of values accomplishment or achievement and that's gonna you're gonna have these two butting hands against each other all the time and at the end of the day especially in this day and age i think cracking open a book it's in a sense an active investment are you willing to put away two hours every single day for example to sit down to read ulysses are you willing to dig through the initial swimming scene in ulysses just to get to the really good part for example right now i am reading the chapter of oxen of the sun and i think that chapter is just one of the most entertaining chapters ever reading a really difficult piece of book is like a roller coaster you're gonna doubt yourself you're gonna feel like yes i mean this for the long term and then two days later you're gonna adapt yourself again and then you're gonna be like yes pass them back and forth but you have to keep that fact at the back of your mind to read in 21st century is basically going against a grain of the main mode of ingesting information which is just very fast very short and very kinetic bursts of information at you to go against that in itself takes a lot of effort and to suffer through this rollercoaster and to understand a piece of classical piece of literature takes even more work and that's why a lot of people quit before they can finish something before they can actually hunker down to flip the book to its last page and say i've read this day so at the end of this video i'm really interested in what you think of this topic should we stick with longer form and combat this urge to quit something early just to derive the final enjoyment or should we simply give in to the urge and quit 20 books before finishing any one of them leave me your answers down below and this is my episode on the digital gap through understanding this distinction between technology and reading can you really make some really truly informed decisions as to what to read and what not to read the choices in your hands i'm not here to tell you what to do i'm still quite confused myself so take what i've presented with a grain of salt and i will see you in the next one you

Channel: Robin Waldun

Views: 38,196

Keywords: why you dont have time to read, why cant i finish anything i start, why cant I finish a book, why people struggle to finish books, how to build focus, how to build focus in studies, how to concentrate when reading, how to concentrate when studying, how to read more books in less time

Id: xFFmuAQI6Ro

Length: 7min 31sec (451 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 02 2021