I have been reading and listening to quite a lot of serious works lately: books, written or recorded, Wikipedia pages with active discussion threads, and even podcasts that are not movie or TV reviews, which I had gotten so used to enjoying in all my free time. This is a 2,000-words post filled with little anecdotes and written in a almost stream of consciousness style. So here is a quick summary for you: I got tired of the type of content I was consuming for a while, so I began to curate a method to tackle the hard books I always wanted to read but never understood. The key was taking it easy.
It all began with watching a video podcast while making my Baozi on a Sunday afternoon. This is one of my favorite times to consume any media, as I am the most relaxed while making the wrappers and filling them with my absolute favorite juicy ground beef and minced onion filling. It’s almost a routine for me to prepare a glass of dark black tea that tastes like an old spoon and sit on the floor with everything laid out neatly in front of me—the exact same setting where I used to make dumplings, Baozi, and other delicate things for others, while watching The Handmaid’s Tale, video essays, or Naruto in French.
That particular afternoon, about a month ago, I had such difficulty choosing the right thing to play because something inside me didn’t want to be entertained. I don’t have quite the vocabulary to express how I felt as I stood in the kitchen holding my iPad. It was as if I were trapped in a very enjoyable rollercoaster ride for days with my mouth taped shut, and I wanted nothing more than for it to stop. In Twitter lingo, nothing was “doing it” for me anymore, and it hadn’t been for a while. The usuals—Claire Saffitz, Bob and Monet, Contrapoints, Hbomberguy, and so on—none of them were giving me any sense of comfort, nor was I learning anything from them either. Since when, I don’t know, I have been watching such content just to “take the edge off.” I was compulsively rewatching the same dozen pieces of content on repeat, not because I was noticing more details in my repeated viewings; in fact, I was paying less and less attention each time I clicked on Canceling (Contrapoints, 2019). I watched them because they were so familiar, so predictable, so safe. In a sense—and using this word very loosely—I was manufacturing an addiction for myself. And that afternoon, I just couldn’t take them in anymore because I needed to not be “me” for a while.
This was on July 28, the day I launched this site by putting together a simple blog post about Liangfen of all things. I did it because the productivity channel I clicked into told me to do so. I have talked about my thoughts on this genre of content in my previous post, but I can’t deny that they can be a perfect kick in the butt when experiencing a nihilistic rut. The video (and the several other autoplays) from this content creator, Ali Abdaal, was about how writing online had made him a millionaire. If I were to be my cynical self, it was just a video of a charming guy recycling the life-changing power of writing and putting oneself out there in a motivational ambience while selling online courses and promoting affiliate links without any regard to his objective attractiveness and privileged background (again, completely baseless accusations from my inner voice—mind you, this is what I have to deal with 24/7). But that didn’t stop me from clicking the title, immediately realizing how this bitter cynicism was the exact reason I wasn’t writing anymore. Fine, I’ll do it. I will put my “shitty” self out there. I bought this domain while the buns were still steaming. I needed to wait no longer and think a lot less to have more agency in the change I had been waiting for since the rupture. Speaking of which, I released the project, Rupture EP, that very same (busy) day.
A quick tangent on content creation: I now think we should put more effort into curating our work ethic rather than obsessing over the specific work itself. I’ve noticed this pattern many times in my life: I am most productive once I start to get really busy. I may have to get into the psychology of motivation in the future, but my working theory for now is this: work gets done when you are already doing something, by getting your digits on the keyboard. Once I start planting the seed, whether it’s some chords on Ableton Live or a couple dozen words in here, the work starts to slowly reveal itself, sooner or later, as long as I maintain consistency. This time, I have to thank the algorithm for some very necessary help as well, since part of the work for the writer in me is to analyze the media I consume and the change in work ethic couldn’t have been achieved without a better content pool.
Once the motivational YouTube videos had exhausted themselves after a couple of autoplays, I clicked on a recommended video from Adam Conover, whose interview with Nataly Wynn I had watched earlier that week. By the time I was eating the steamed buns, I was already watching his interview with Yanis Varoufakis on techno-feudalism, and then it was his interview with Ed Zitron on the AI bubble, his interview with Brian Merchant about the Luddites… how did I miss out on so much… good stuff? How did these concepts and ideas that I would have devoured without a second thought slip under my radar for all these years? Then autoplay led me to his interview with Naomi Klein about her book Doppelganger, and listening to her made me realize what I had been doing wrong in my approach to consuming content or even learning in general.
I had been actively rejecting personal growth. This blog has become one anecdote after another, but here’s another one. I had a middle school math teacher once who taught us for a month while our regular teacher was on pregnancy leave. She was more than competent, charismatic, and had a perfect teaching record, yet we never really cared for her, simply because she taught a class where most of the students were enrolled with lower grades, and we were proudly the high achievers. Gross. (The emotional damage of school elitism is a topic that needs more online discourse.) After a month of brutal torture from 14-year-olds rejecting their “stepmom,” she said something interesting to the whole class: “You look down on simple tasks, yet you fail so miserably at the complex tasks as well.” This was how I felt listening to all these fascinating people.
Although I was amazed by these conversations, I knew I didn’t understand most of what they were saying—in the sense that I couldn’t confidently paraphrase these talks. The problem for me was that I didn’t understand some very important historical backgrounds and basic terms in these fields. I wanted to somehow create my magnum opus without laying the groundwork. Simply put, I had been too arrogant to learn the basics, yet too ignorant to consume any challenging content.
So this time, I started easy. The reason I singled out the Naomi Klein interview earlier was that it was my perfect gateway step out of my content cocoon. In linguistic terms, it was my “comprehensible input.” I could understand the conversation, I was interested in the topic of conspiracy theories, and the book she was promoting seemed easy enough to read. Initially, I was going to let the excuse “I don’t have time to sit down and read” get to me—and it was true, I was working 8 hours a day with 90 minutes of walking every day. What about audiobooks? Perfect. I didn’t even wait for “it’s not really reading a book” to sink in and bought it on Audible. I started listening the minute it was downloaded, and it became the first nonfiction book I consumed this year. So began my content purge in August. I have finished three audiobooks during my commute, and I do believe this is a legitimate way of learning.
If you can take one thing away from this blog post, learn to start easy with hard books. This could mean starting with introductory books or simply reading with little to no pressure on yourself, using segmented reading, non-linear reading, or getting a “…for dummies” version of the concept. To give you a counterexample, my journey with Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies will probably haunt me forever. Although I disagree a lot with this book, especially now after reading other works in political philosophy, this book has somewhat shaped my political views. However, it took me almost two hard years to finish this two-volume book, with many soft quits that sometimes lasted months. It wasn’t that it was a horribly written book filled with indecipherable gibberish—Hegel comes to mind, whom I would never attempt again. In fact, Karl Popper’s writing is very approachable, not at all condescending, and very clear. The problem was that the soil wasn’t ready for the seeds to be planted. I didn’t understand Plato enough to enjoy volume one, and I didn’t know anything about Marx to learn from volume two. To me, the book became a very long and dry gossip column on philosophers, and this experience unconsciously demotivated me from reading any nonfiction that you can’t find in a coffee shop. I believe if I had listened to the audiobook version FIRST, it would have been a very different experience.
Here’s my new system approaching a new hard book.
- Read the table of contents, and if possible, see what each chapter focuses on.
- Read the Wikipedia page or some other type of summary content on this book.
- Listen to the audiobook version while doing sports, cooking, or cleaning.
- Get the paperback, and read with marker in hand.
The idea is simple. First, build the content structure—this will help set expectations, which builds anticipation and helps the brain form a framework for the knowledge. Secondly, get the general idea of the content by reading a simplified version—there’s no need to understand it fully since the book reading is next. I find this almost necessary when reading authors like Hannah Arendt or Judith Butler, as they did not write with the general public in mind. Without quite a bit of context, it’s hard to get anything out of these books. Thirdly, listen to the audiobook version while doing autopilot tasks. I have always been an auditory learner, so I think I connect with the content most when I can hear it. I don’t worry about getting distracted either, since I know I will eventually read the written version, which the audiobook will never fully replace. Think of it as a quick scan where you add bits and pieces to the framework you’ve established with the two previous steps. The goal is to have sufficient information on this book so that you are better prepared for more intensive reading in the next step, where you detail your canvas and connect the dots to form a coherent understanding of the book. And remember, this process can and should take a longer period, with pauses for deeper reflection on what you are reading as well. Preferably, it should end with a written summary, like a simple book report or a blog post.
With this method, I was able to finish at least two books that I had always wanted to work through: The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt. I will have to write about them eventually when I have enough confidence to tackle such complex themes. But at least for now, I am confident enough to say that I know what she’s talking about in these books, even though I don’t fully understand. This is important to me, since prior to this August, these were merely books I wished I could get my hands on. Now, after getting acquainted with the content, I know what I’m missing in order to understand them further—a bit of Plato, a lot more Thomas Hobbes, and even more personal reflection.
So there you go. This is how I’m going to consume content, dissect it, analyze it, and put together comprehensible work in the form of blog posts for others to see. The goal isn’t to achieve statistical success with writing, nor is it to apply for a PhD in philosophy in five years. It’s just me taking small steps at a time to rebuild and reshape my life, to accomplish goals that I have been too timid to even attempt. I hope this works for you, as it did for me.
Yes the color name. 