Buried Bookworm

I’ve been tracking books that I read since 2015, and, frankly, I’m pretty embarassed at how little I read these days. To be fair, there were periods of time where I was pretty burnt out from life and work that I just didn’t log them. But that number of missing books is still pretty miniscule.

From the time that I could read until my late teenage years, I used to read feverishly; so much so that it wasn’t uncommon for me to stay up way past my bedtime reading for hours and hours, to the point that I was basically a zombie the next day. That’s probably not healthy per se, but neither is just not reading at all.

I think things probably changed around 2007 when I first started getting into web development. I had launched a website with friends and the list of features I wanted to build was never-ending. Every which way that I looked, there was something to learn, an improvement to be made, a new direction to explore.

I don’t exactly regret setting aside so much else to explore my new-found passion for web development, but I do miss the breadth of interests that I had back then. As time went on, the scales tipped further and further, and the doorway for other things to take up precious time and energy away from development became more like a keyhole. And I loved twisting the key and locking myself away to pursue this one passion of mine.

I admit, it’s a small point of pride that I’ve never been very engaged with a lot of addictive social media, and I’d like to think that my passion and desire to learn about the web is a more fruitful use of my time. But my passion for the web runs deep, so there are probably a lot of parallel psychological things going on there.

It’s a web that I can’t help but get caught in.

(Sorry, that was bad, but it was right there.)

Going forth, I think I’m going to set aside at least one hour each day to completely unplug and read. It’s all too easy for me to find some new rabbit hole to dive into when I’ve got an internet connection, so I think forcefully removing it from my reach, if only for an hour a day, will be the kick in the pants I need to expand my horizons with reading once again.