Lost in the Infinite Scroll – Until a Small Ritual Restored My Passion for Reading

When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Reading for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an overheard discussion – I would research it and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d spend a few moments reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny ritual has been quietly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the practice. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in conversation, the very act of noticing, logging and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, take out my phone and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the stranger squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a word test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” as well. But most of them stay like museum pieces – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something precise and strong. Rarely are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect word you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after years of slack scrolling, is at last stirring again.