Adrift in the Infinite Scroll – Till a Small Ritual Restored My Passion for Books

As a child, I consumed books until my eyes blurred. Once my exams arrived, I demonstrated the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in lately, I’ve observed that ability for deep focus dissolve into infinite scrolling on my device. My focus now contracts like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Reading for pleasure feels less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I aimed to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

Therefore, about a twelve months back, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t know – whether in a novel, an piece, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost 20 pages, and this small ritual has been subtly life-changing. The payoff is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, superficial focus.

There is also a journalling 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 routine to keep up. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to pause mid-paragraph, pull out my device and type “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I incorporate maybe five percent of these words into my daily speech. “unreformable” was adopted. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and catalogued but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something precise and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into place.

In an era when our devices drain our attention with relentless effectiveness, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the pleasure of exercising a mind that, after a long time of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.