Adrift in the Endless Scroll – Until a Small Ritual Restored My Passion for Books

As a child, I devoured novels until my vision grew hazy. When my GCSEs came around, I exercised the stamina of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without pause. But in recent years, I’ve observed that capacity for intense focus dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Engaging with books for enjoyment seems less like sustenance and more like a marathon. And for a person who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to regain that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small vow: every time I encountered a term I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or fountain pen. Just a running list kept, ironically, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reviewing the collection back in an effort to lodge the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now covers almost twenty sheets, and this small ritual has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about showing off with uncommon adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and note a term, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very act of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.

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

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is often very inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the tube, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my device and type “millennialism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can slow my reading to a frustrating crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the reviewing (which I often forget to do), conscientiously browsing through my growing vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I integrate perhaps 5% of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm reaching less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and muscular. Rarely are more satisfying than unearthing the exact term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the picture into place.

At a time when our gadgets drain our attention with merciless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I worried I’d lost – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.