yeahisawthatalready

For the past many months, my obsession with wanting to write consistently, daily and well has resulted in my reading stuff* on the internet like a mad person. What I have learnt from this is: the internet is unfathomably vast. Its vastness is something you cannot really fathom at all. It is so vast, your power to fathom anything at all just falls incredibly short. When I was much younger, I was once told that anything you could possibly conceive of was already there on the internet. If you dig deep enough, you'll find little crevices or caves in which people discuss/believe in the most mindblowing of things. (The thing that has managed to blow my mind the most in the past couple of months is of course Otherkin. But, dear reader, let this not limit your imagination as to how blown your mind can be by the internet.) 

So what began as an every morning adventure to find stuff to read immediately after my newspapers spiraled horribly into an obsessive need to read everything I could possibly lay my hands on that day. I realized how much of a problem it was when four Fridays ago Longreads posted their weekly Top 5 posts, and I had read most of them already. I realized it was a problem when, I would get emails from friends about interesting things they'd read that day or week, and I would have already read it. I realized it was a problem when I was having dinner with some friends and I had read everything they were discussing. 

I realized that the problem wasn't that I had already read it, the problem was that I wasn't sure if I was actually processing anything I was reading. It had has reached a point where I'm reading stuff because I think I need to just read stuff, and not because I want to read stuff. It's almost as if I read it, bookmark it and file it away. For most of what I read, I don't even do what I used to do even two months ago: Make mental notes in the margins, follow up, write about it, wonder what happened of it. None of that at all.

Is it just the curse of the vastness of the internet that leaves me with a mountain of things to read, and not much time to read it with? So many people with such interesting things to say, so many articles and essays that are painstakingly well put together, so many things that people say anyway, so many things that I think I need to know or opinions I need to hear - How can I leave reading these to the accidents of social interactions, emails or drunken dinners? 

But at the same time, what's the point of reading it and then not remembering even seeing it the next time someone brings it up? Just for the joy of "yeah, I saw that already"?

Does anyone else have these problems?

**

*i say "stuff" because i really don't know a more appropriate word for the melange of things people read on the internet

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