You are laying down scrolling on your phone when your phone vibrates. A message from your friend sends you a YouTube video. You click on it, find it so compelling it stops your scroll. But you choose to watch it later, click the watch later button, and continue scrolling.
In the same week, while you are scrolling, you glance at a book near you that you wanted to read. The one you bought because you wanted it, not because you should.
You found the video so compelling it stopped your scroll, and you still didn’t watch it. Why?
It is not boredom it’s not guilt. It’s closer to a specific grief. Reading used to be easy and a pleasure. Now getting to it costs a toll it never used to cost.
You find it hard to hold a page for ten minutes, but you hold three hours of reels, The Odyssey, or a long conversation with your friend. A broken attention span does not explain those exceptions.
It isn’t discipline and it isn’t just you.
The Pace ProblemOn the highway the roads force you to decide. You cannot stop, you cannot turn around, and two hours later you remember arriving but not the drive.
In the city the street decides, but it lets you slow down. Lights, turns, someone crossing. You remember what happened.
Walking, you decide. You can stop. You can go back and look at the door you just passed. That is the only one of the three where going backwards is even possible.
The social media feed is the highway. I notice it most when I come back from the highway. After ninety minutes of scrolling, I can’t sit down with a book. The words are the same words I read last week, but my brain is still calibrated for the speed of the feed. The skeptic in you might think this just means the book is boring and the feed is interesting, but that objection gets the direction wrong: the feed did not find you interesting, it trained you to need its pace, and that training can be undone.
A long form video is the street. Reading is walking. And the reason you cannot read after training your brain to scroll is not that walking is harder than driving. It is that you are used to going fast.
Why go slow when you can go fast ? isn’t driving fast more enjoyable ? more fun ?
Reading is not harder than scrolling, it’s slower and no one shifts from top gear to bottom gear cold.
How to Shift GearsReading lets you go back. When something is not clear, you return to it. Sometimes a sentence or a page. That is built into reading and it’s why it takes the time it takes.
The feed cannot do that. Once you get your dopamine, you move to the next one.
That’s the difference: not speed. You cannot go back on the highway. You cannot stop and look again at the thing you missed.
Everything you have learned, you learned somewhere you were allowed to go back. In the walking speed.
Spend more time where going back is possible, because that is where things stick.
You can do it this week. The next time you put a video into watch later, watch it now instead, with your thumb off the screen. You will notice two things: your brain will fight to speed it up, and by the end you will remember it better than the thirty reels you forgot. That tiny rebellion is the first step back to walking speed.
See you next week.
— Youssef.
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