Lost in the Endless Scroll – Till a Small Ritual Restored My Passion for Books

When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. When my exams came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus fade into endless browsing on my phone. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a finger. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the mental decline.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an article, or an overheard conversation – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my phone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure descriptors – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I look up and note a word, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my brain is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of noticing, logging and revising it interrupts the drift into inactive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a journalling aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is frequently very impractical. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, pull out my device and type “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to elbow the person squeezed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate perhaps five percent of these words into my daily speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “Lugubrious” as well. But most of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my mind much sharper. I find myself reaching less often for the same tired selection of descriptors, and more often for something precise and muscular. Rarely are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like finding the lost component that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thought. And it has given me back something I feared I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy scrolling, is at last stirring again.