Reading Rituals
cruiseandpaul.substack.com
cruiseandpaul.substack.com
Those are the moments when I stop being a responsible adult in life, a spouse, an employee, a colleague, or a friend. I'm just a child wallowing in silly wonderlands of imagination.
-- C.S. Lewis
Setting this up in my not so big room is kind of my "wind down" ritual.
But if I am reading non fiction, I am usually on my computer with DEVONThink helping me with annotations and so on, but then there is no music, no whiskey, no vaping and no nonsense :P
Recently I've spent a lot more time reading than I previously did because I've had a lot of neck pain from migraines - the migraine medications I'm on are pretty effective at clearing the headaches, but not so much the neck pain (so far anyway). Lying down fixes the neck pain, so I spend a lot of time reading, mostly nonfiction. I've been reading a bunch of books about American public libraries, it turns out they're really interesting and have a very rich history!
Did Exceed and Dr Pepper pay for the promotion? Seems like almost all of this person's newsletters mention some product or service.
Though, I assume people around here tend to work cushy tech jobs that involve staring at a computer all day and know nothing else.
It took me a while to understand why my parents didn't have hobbies, abandoned self-study courses, did little outside of maintenance tasks, etc. The first chunk of my working life put me in positions where physical exhaustion became real.
Some people really don't have the space in their lives to engage in non-critical life activities. Off the top of my head, I don't know of any philosophers that have explored those types of lives. Are those types of people destined to grind until their last days? This seems especially important to understand as safety nets like Social Security become less reliable.
Nowadays, I understand they were trying to build up a business (and more or less succeeded). I've had periods when I started a freelance business and worked too much, but now that I've got a daughter, family comes first. But maybe that's a luxury.
So no successful serial entrepreneur story there, more like deciding to charge more and invest the remainder in the stock market :-)
"Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work" by Matthew B. Crawford [1, 2] is one such book. The author holds a PhD in soft sciences, but works as a motorcycle mechanic.
Having worked as a brush cutter and tree planter, I can fully confirm that e.g. physical work can be exhausting to the point that all you want to do at night is finish your household chores and then get to sleep. I'm definitely a bookworm, but I remember having much less interest in reading, abstract reasoning or even listening to music at that time. It is probably related to the day-long exposure to industrial noise that a brush cutter experiences. Your brain is tired.
I've always found tradesmen interesting, but after that personal experience, I think I have a much better understanding for their occasional grumpiness and the "rough edges" they have. More often than not, they're probably just really tired.
1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6261332-shop-class-as-so...
At the moment, no. My shifts are 6am to midnight, six days a week. Day 7 is for laundry, exercise, phoning home and catching up on sleep. Lots of us have jobs that require long hours at least temporarily. For me (military) we will keep this pace until at least mid-January but this is a norm in many industries. Talk to anyone working on any sort of ship, resource extraction, farming, or remote locations. The hours are long, the rooms are small, but the pay is high. Time for reading is a privilege. Only those with "normal" jobs have the stability and time to associate rituals with reading.
What they said was:
> reading alone in a room on a couch is a rare indulgence
> Time for reading is a privilege. Only those with "normal" jobs have the stability and time to associate rituals with reading.
Virtually everyone has time to read, even if it's 5-10 minutes between shifts. Whatever time you spend reading or posting on HN could be spent reading a book, which is not to say that it should be, only that this "time for reading is a privilege" stuff is nonsense.
Like another person here who can’t find the time due to young children in the house, I spent years fantasizing about disappearing into a book but I was too tired, too overworked, and constantly playing catch-up with kids and the home. These days I read just about every night to fall asleep. Maybe as my kids get older I’ll find time to read during the day a bit more too. Or maybe not.
I mean to say this stuff isn’t static, and one person's rare indulgence is another’s routine. It doesn’t mean much. And it will probably change.
Sigh, next year :)