I read one of those Silicon Valley self-help/motivational books once that said something to the effect of you should try to create more than you consume. I’m pretty sure that’s the reason I still have an active blog. I wanted to have a low resistance way of making stuff where I could just throw things out into the ether.
Every year it does feel like I have more things that make it possible for me to consume. And more of my time is dedicated to consuming things. Just feeling like this blob in space that needs to constantly be fed. Notice I didn’t attribute what book it was that I read, because I truly have no idea. I’ve read dozens of those books over the years.
I’ve always felt like reading should be a goal. Read more. But after several of these books, the information just tends to blend together more and more. Every podcast I listen to is just background noise information. Going in one ear and out the other. Writing this blog post, that idea actually is kind of comforting. If I royally screw something up here, it won’t matter because this post would just be one of the hundreds of things that reader would have consumed today. Sad, but comforting, sort of like no one noticing you dancing at a concert. Freeing that you can do whatever you want but lonely in that you are ultimately not being noticed.
But that’s why I’m here writing. Not because I have anything novel to say but quite the opposite. I have information in my head that’s just there, swirling around. And here I can give it a job. Using this time to write allows me time to not consume. I’m giving my brain a moment to process and to relax as opposed to shoving another YouTube essay into it.
After this post I plan to read. I’m sitting here still recovering from a surgery. In between naps I drink water, write and read. It’s not a bad life. But this consumption will be fiction.
I used to feel like non-fiction reading was in someway superior. But as established previously, it’s just more information on top of the pile of information I already have in my head. It took me a long time to get into fiction reading, dialogue was always hard for me to follow. But creating the imaginative worlds forces your brain to work. It has to conceive of what the characters sound like, what they look like, what the house smells like. All the senses are engaged when you read fiction.