A Harried Mother's Guide to Doom Scrolling

In Which I am Triggered by an Article on the Internet

File: Interior with poppies and reading woman (Lizzy Hohlenberg) 905.jpeg - Wikimedia Commons

I’m really hoping this won’t be the case, but posting might be all over the place over the next few days. The college people are getting through their finals, and somehow, the ones in high school all have stuff due the day of our Saint Nicholas Fair, which obviously will not suit any of us, so we’ve got to race through the week in a kind of academic fury. On the plus side of the equation, the person with the broken computer cord has replaced it so that she can charge her device. Maybe now I can blog in the usual way. Fingers Crossed.

Anyway, I’ve been toggling back and forth between Daniel Penny and Luigi Mangione and the meltdown in Syria trying to imagine that there might come a time when the events of the hour are so boring that I will be justified in wandering away and reading a book for a couple of minutes. Seriously, I’m so triggered by this long piece about how it should be possible to read a hundred pages of a book a day. Triggered, I tell you. Nay, even micro-aggressed.

I won’t drag you through the whole piece. Here is the reason the author, Matthew Walther, decided to read a hundred pages a day:

The most common question I have received regarding the hundred pages strategy is, of course, How do you do it? This has proven more difficult to answer than I thought it would. While I have chosen to refer to it as a “strategy,” the truth is that most of it, including the page target itself, is really something more like a post-hoc attempt at systematizing my own habits; I did not wake up one day as an infrequent reader and work slowly towards one hundred pages a day out of some inchoate desire for self-improvement. Rather, like many of us, I decided some years ago that if I did not take it upon myself to spend less time scrolling through Wikipedia or the AllMusic Guide or returning to my Twitter “feed”—the implicit image of a trough is appropriate—I would find myself losing one of my greatest pleasures to sheer indolence.

Yes yes yes, exactly, but how do you do it?

If you seriously intend to read one hundred pages each day—not occasionally when there is nothing to watch or when you find yourself racing to discover whether the lay cook or the sinister young monk is the killer—you will probably find that you open a book within an hour of waking up in the morning. I start my own reading after I finish looking at the headlines and answering (or more realistically neglecting) correspondence. This is sometimes but not always when I read my heavy book, following my first cup of coffee and my first cigarette of the day. This slot is open until 9:00 A.M. or so, depending upon what time I have risen and what other tasks present themselves. It involves no more than twenty or twenty-five pages, usually with some note-taking.

We’re going to see how this goes down throughout the day, but I may plainly and tragically admit that, for me, though I do often wake up around 4:30, the last thing I would do is climb out of bed and go make a cup of coffee. I set up Matt’s caffeine contraption the night before so that before he wakes up it suddenly and loudly begins to brew. Then he gets out of bed and prays to his God and reads the Holy Scriptures. At some point, he puts a large pot of tea on the shelf beside my head. I am pinioned by at least one cat and a dog and can barely move, but I do manage to find my phone in order to see what horrors or memes transpired during the night. So, of course, sure, I could flip on the light and read a book. That would make all the sense in the world. But, see, ten to one I didn’t sleep dreamlessly through the night. I probably woke up every hour to stare into the darkness and ponder the existence of the universe. Therefore, while I down that first pot of morning oolong, I fall in and out of sleep while I read my favorite news websites. Moreover, I don’t just read the headlines, I read whole articles, and it doesn’t take me twenty minutes because I can’t possibly stay awake for a whole minute.

Finally, at 7 am it’s time for Zoom Morning Prayer and unless it’s my day to lead, I get it up on my phone and either keep chugging down my allotment of Barry’s English Breakfast or listen to it while at Planet Fitness or on my long one hour walk. And what I’d like to know is, does Mr. Walther take any exercise? Because my fitness routine consumes fully ten hours of my week. I could chuck my physical health, I suppose, but then every time I read the internet I would be overcome by tidal waves of fear about how I will soon be keeling over from heart disease, cancer, osteoporosis, or generalized early-onset death syndrome.

Having to lift heavy weights isn’t a complete waste of intellectual time. That’s when I listen to the Bible and then normally books, except when the news is so constantly exciting that I just have to catch up on a couple of podcasts. Just one or two.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter because obviously I could read in those hours before seven. I could so WHY DON’T I?

We carry on:

One of the most common misconceptions—I almost said “excuses”—that one hears from people who say they wish they read more is that reading must be done for an hour or more without interruption. When I talk about time slots, I am not saying that one should count on being able to read for long stretches during the requisite period; I am simply suggesting that it is one of the possible times at which, upon examination, one span of time previously given over to other things is likely to be available.

Now is where you may observe me melt down. I. Hate. Being. Interrupted. And my whole life is an interruption. Why do you think I can’t post in a timely fashion? Because as soon as I sit down to write or read it is a wide open invitation for vast throngs of people to come over and start telling me that they need food dye for the science experience they just remembered, or that they have to choose an essay topic and should have done it yesterday. Meanwhile, my phone is buzzing like some sort of demented insect. It’s not a matter of long stretches, it’s being able to read a whole sentence without having to start over and over again.

This is how I became addicted to scrolling. After saying something, however short or long, the person will just wander away. Ah, I think, now I will begin to read and will resume looking at the page. Just at the moment another person will come and begin speaking loudly and then wander away. Ah, I think again, now I will begin to read…should I repeat myself a few more times? After a while, I just give up and look at my phone waiting for the next person to intrude upon my thoughts. So yes, of course, I shouldn’t scroll, but I wasn’t reading before the dawn of Facebook and Twitter. Back then I just stared at the wall waiting to be talked at by children.

Anyway, here is the next interval in which Mr. Walther reads:

My second large-ish chunk of reading usually comes around lunchtime. Even a quick lunch—standing in line to grab a sandwich, microwaving leftovers in a break room—usually affords an opportunity for reading ten or fifteen pages. In my own case, I like to take a walk in the middle of the day; reading while walking or sitting outside is itself an important part of the hundred pages strategy. It could even be argued that certain books demand to be read outdoors: there is a park in Marquette, Michigan, that I am half-convinced was designed for the explicit purpose of facilitating the reading of Aurélia and Stephen MacKenna’s Plotinus. But even less romantic readers will find that parks, backyards, and coffee shops are conducive to reading precisely because we do not associate them with work, or at least not with wage labor. Which brings me to the third slot, in late afternoon, when I tend to find myself waiting for emails or phone calls, a time which can easily lend itself to bored, impatient scrolling.

Someone get me an office job quick! Just kidding. In an office, I wouldn’t have any space to fold laundry or sweep up the cardboard box chewed up by the dog. I would read at lunchtime except that I have to make the lunch, set the table, put it on the table, eat it while everyone talks loudly, clean it up, and then try to get on with the workday. Now comes the worst part:

The rest of my reading takes place at night. After my wife and children go to bed, my time is generally my own. I usually read for an hour in my office and another half hour in bed, unless it is football season, in which case I read during the commercial breaks of primetime games. (So much of the tedium of pointlessly long N.F.L. broadcasts can be avoided after discovering that advertisements can be ignored safely without missing any of the game itself; even with the sound muted your peripheral vision will let you know when the action has resumed.) The final slot is almost always reserved for light reading—novels, undemanding history or biography or belles-lettres, collections of letters or published diaries, or Arthur Waley’s Genji, which I like to re-read over and over again slowly, five or so pages at a time, over the course of a year.

I’m sure Mr. Walther is the nicest of men—intelligent, perspicacious, diligent, and inclined toward all good works—but I’d like to discover how many pages of books a day his wife reads and when she does it. Does she, like he, lock her phone in a drawer? Does her early bedtime include a stack of tomes to see her through the midnight hour? Or does she, like me, fall dead asleep the minute her head hits the pillow?

As for me, I have to get a few minutes of troubled slumber in before jerking wide awake wondering about the apocalypse. Just to be sure, my phone is right there, reminding me that everything is going as badly as I expected.

Ok, so, have a nice day, whatever is left of it!