How do I develop the patience to read books?

(I’m not blaming you, by the way. It’s not your fault that you live in the twenty-first century. Owning a phone is basically mandatory in developed countries.)

This isn’t just a pointless history lesson. I’m asking this question for a good reason. You are not constitutionally incapable of reading a book. You weren’t born with the inability to sit and consume hundreds of pages. There is something in your environment, or some habituation, that is preventing you from reading a whole book. If you can figure out what it is, then I would be willing to bet that you could increase your attention span by removing it.

If you want to develop the patience to read books, then I suggest you stop using your phone so much. The next time you go to the bathroom, don’t take your phone with you. When you’re doing something not involving your phone, don’t just set your phone down beside you. It’s still calling to you and asking for your attention from that position. Instead, put it away. And I mean away away. In the next room. Put it on silent.

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Phones, internet, social media. Constant change and hyper-stimulus. Before that, there was television, with a camera angle that changes every few seconds. Our attention spans are shredded because of the kind of media we consume.

So, what could be shortening your attention span? Personally, I think it’s this:

There was a time when everybody — at least, everybody who could read — had the patience to read books. It’s only in modern times that we have a sizable proportion of the population who are literate but cannot read a whole book.

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So, if you do not have the attention span to read an entire book, I think it’s appropriate to ask why. Two hundred years ago, a person in a roughly equivalent position to you would have easily been able to sit and read a few hundred pages, no sweat.

Then, go sit on a park bench, and bring a book and nothing else. Believe me, you’ll read it. You’ll sit and fidget and look around and tug your collar for a few minutes. But then you’ll read. And you might just find that you get sucked in.