Adrift in the Endless Scroll – Till a Small Practice Restored My Passion for Reading

When I was a youngster, I devoured novels until my eyes blurred. Once my GCSEs arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for deep concentration dissolve into endless browsing on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a occupational risk as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Nothing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few moments reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear insufferable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and record a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in dialogue, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, superficial focus.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

Not that it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and enter “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The Kindle, with its integrated lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing word-hoard like I’m preparing for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my everyday conversation. “Incorrigible” was adopted. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – admired and listed but seldom handled.

Nevertheless, it’s made my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused handful of adjectives, and more often for something exact and muscular. Few things are more satisfying than unearthing the exact word you were seeking – like locating the lost puzzle piece that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets siphon off our focus with merciless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after a long time of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.