I Quit the Attention Economy — and Learned How to Read Again.

Hey friends,

We’re now in the second week of our 30-day digital minimalist cohort, and I’m really starting to feel the difference. The biggest change? My stamina for reading difficult and unfamiliar text has gone way up.

For the past few years, I’ve had this vague goal of shaking off my philistine roots and slowly making my way through the Western canon (whatever that even means). I’ve always found nonfiction easy—it feels productive. Self-help offers answers to questions I already have, pop science provides new facts to file away. Both feed nicely into a culture of productivity. There’s closure. There’s something to do with what you’ve read.

Fiction never offered that.

I’ve never truly enjoyed it—at least, not the process of reading it. In the past, I got through novels by enjoying the goal of having read them. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I mostly liked having a more pretentious goodreads. If I wanted pleasure, there were games or TV. If I wanted to learn, there was always another nonfiction book. Fiction didn’t seem to fit anywhere.

And literature? Even harder. Not only does it refuse to give you clear answers, but it’s slow, dense, and difficult to parse. Reading Homer or Dostoevsky used to feel like trudging through fog and no reward other than the claim “I’m the kind of person who’s read Crime and Punishment.“

Still, I knew I was missing something. This was great literature and I was in the wrong. I felt there must be a way to acquire the taste. It couldn’t be that some people were readers and some were not.

Then the cohort began.

After a few weeks without YouTube, Netflix, podcasts, or background music, something inside me began to settle. I’d subdued the frenetic noise of the attention economy in my own life. I picked Demons back up—a book I had abandoned halfway through—and read a hundred pages in a single 2 hour sitting.

To a seasoned reader, that might not sound like much. To me, it felt miraculous.

I wasn’t just trudging through; I was absorbed. Excited by Pyotr’s Joker-like antics, empathizing with Stavrogin’s apathy. For the first time, I wasn’t reading to finish or to impress. I was fully engrossed and excited to return when I finally put the book down.

Two things changed in me. First, I became more patient—able to stay with difficult things longer. Second, I stopped demanding that every action be immediately productive.

That shift spilled into other areas too. I started taking long walks again, and without a podcast or playlist filling every silence, I needed something to think about. That’s where literature came in—not as a project, but as a companion. Fiction gives me richer material for mind-wandering and pondering.

In Demons, I see a restless youth turning to nihilism in an unstable country—and I recognize something of our own time, and of myself. In Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus, I see my grandfather: his love, his pride, his decline.

This, I think, is what literature is for. It doesn’t close questions—it opens them. It doesn’t give you life hacks or quick insights. It invites you to linger, to wonder, to connect across time.

These things get lost in the noise of the attention economy because they can’t be turned into metrics. They grow too slowly for that. But when we take our time back—when we reclaim our attention—something beautiful happens.

In the short term, we regain our capacity to focus - to orient our attention.
In the long term, we regain our capacity for wonder and grow through wonder.

That’s not the kind of growth productivity promises.
It’s the kind that makes life feel a little more human again.

My Links:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@nathanlaundry

• Discord: https://discord.gg/gYMVfRYK

• GitHub: https://github.com/NLaundry

• Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/lifeandlab/posts

Last week’s video was about the enshittification of search engines and how to get off the corporate web and into a smaller, more human indie web. Honestly, I thought it was a pretty good video.

As you can see, I’m trying something new with the newsletter. I’m trying to write more personal stories about digital minimalism and homelabbing instead of just telling you what I’ve been up to.

I think I’ll stick to this for a bit unless you all find it insufferable.

It’s nice to think of my week as stories and little pivots of personal growth. I hope it’s useful to you too, maybe you’ll see signs of similar growth in yourself as we homelab and go through the cohorts together.

Let me know what you think!

Cheers,
Nathan Laundry