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Comment by delichon | Hacker News Reader

I spent so many hours reading books as a child and feel that my world is larger and richer for it. But even so I'd like to go back and whisper in my little ear, put down the book for a while and go outside and read the world with every sense and then write on it with every tool you can find or make. I love books but have hidden in them as much as built on them. All good things can be abused.

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Perhaps I was just lucky but I did both. In my primary school years I spent the long summer days of the long summer holiday tramping the fields, building dams in streams, catching newts, frogs, tiny fish in my hands, getting muddy to the eyeballs, in the evenings I read everything I could lay my hands on. At breakfast I read the back of the cereal packet if nothing else was available.

Everything in moderation!

But I don't think it's very common for reading to be the thing that keeps people from "touching grass" enough.

Especially now that the competition is screens and social media.

Being raised before the internet appeared increasingly feels like a privilege.

While I don't have any myself, when I'm out and about I'll look around and see kids outside playing. Basketball, hopscotch, tag.

Even when I don't see it live, chalk drawings on sidewalks are clear giveaways that young people still go outside and have fun.

I grew up with the internet pretty readily available and still had similar adventures to what the parent comment mentioned.

The internet has become ubiquitous to everyday life, but humans are still human and kids are still kids.

That's the one reservation I have about reading. When you're reading you aren't living, in a sense.

Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45557/the-tables-turn...

Ah, so this is where the line "We murder to disect" comes from. Ta.

What a great read!

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