Adrift in the Infinite Scroll – Until a Small Practice Renewed My Love for Books

When I was a child, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. Once my GCSEs arrived, I exercised the endurance of a ascetic, revising for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a snail at the touch of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment feels less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for someone who writes for a profession, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to halt the mental decline.

So, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I encountered a word I didn’t understand – whether in a novel, an article, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Not a thing elaborate, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each week, I’d spend a few minutes reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.

The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny habit has been subtly transformative. The benefit is less about showing off with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a term, I feel a faint stretch, as though some neglected part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never use “phantom” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed focus.

There is also a diary-keeping element to it – it functions as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been listening to.

Not that it’s an easy routine to maintain. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to pause in the middle, pull out my device and enter “millenarianism” into my digital document while trying not to bump the person squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its integrated lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding vocabulary collection like I’m preparing for a word test.

In practice, I incorporate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “Incorrigible” made the cut. “mournful” too. But most of them remain like exhibits – appreciated and listed but rarely handled.

Still, it’s made my mind much sharper. I notice I'm turning less frequently for the same tired handful of adjectives, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Rarely are more satisfying than discovering the perfect word you were seeking – like locating the lost component that snaps the image into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless efficiency, it feels subversive to use my own as a instrument for deliberate thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d lost – the joy of exercising a intellect that, after years of slack browsing, is finally stirring again.