Adrift in the Endless Scroll – Till a Small Ritual Restored My Love for Books

When I was a child, I devoured books until my vision grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the stamina of a monk, revising for hours without pause. But in recent years, I’ve watched that capacity for deep focus fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now contracts like a slug at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that cognitive flexibility, to stop the brain rot.

So, about a twelve months back, I made a small vow: every time I came across a term I didn’t understand – whether in a book, an piece, or an overheard discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no elegant notebook or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, ironically, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reading the collection back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my recall.

The list now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly transformative. The payoff is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, let’s face it, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I look up and note a term, I feel a slight expansion, as though some underused part of my brain is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “phantom” in conversation, the very process of noticing, logging and reviewing it breaks the drift into passive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a journalling aspect to it – it functions as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

It's not as if it’s an easy routine to keep up. It is frequently very inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the stranger pressed against me. It can reduce my pace to a frustrating speed. (The e-reader, with its built-in dictionary, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently forget to do), dutifully scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

In practice, I integrate maybe five percent of these words into my daily conversation. “unreformable” was adopted. “mournful” too. But most of them stay like exhibits – admired and catalogued but seldom handled.

Still, it’s rendered my thinking much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same overused selection of adjectives, and more often for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than unearthing the perfect term you were seeking – like finding the lost puzzle piece that snaps the image into place.

In an era when our devices drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a tool for slow thought. And it has restored to me something I feared I’d lost – the joy of engaging a mind that, after years of slack browsing, is at last waking up again.