@JennyZee

Or is it relegated to a TL;DR?

I come to you from a particularly descriptive library at an equally descriptive university. One of which I will not reveal because well… because stalkers, scary people and all the other anxiety inducing thoughts materializing in my head.

Have I lost you already? If so, I would say au revoir but I guess you are already gone.

I want to start something. Hence, this whole webpage. But I don’t know what to start because I am worried no one has the attention span to listen, or rather read whatever it is I am starting here.

I myself do not find it all that engaging or compelling to read things I find on the internet. I used to be afraid to admit this fact and when sharing a new thing I had learned from Tik Tok I would begin with “I was reading an article…”. But who has read an article in this day an age? I felt much like a window. The person saw, you guessed it, right through me.

So now I say “I saw this Tik Tok…” and I am finding I say it more and more. More than I would like so I switched out my phone in my bedroom for an alarm clock to curb the phone addiction. But now I have replaced it with an iPad. (yikes)

I am trying to improve, yet the days are longer than expected and I always find the time to scroll or watch a video. And when I do find those pockets of time (despite my clear addiction to the scroll I have become more mindful of it) I wonder what people used to fill their days with.

Not in a time before modern conveniences, because-I do imagine – that in a time before electricity, running water, and pasteurization people filled their days with survival.

What did people fill their days with in the 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s??? Yes these people are alive and well. Namely my parents but I do find it more interesting to ponder this thought on my own.

My conclusion 97% of the time? Reading.

I saw this Tik Tok, (here I go again) with the premise that reading has become an indicator for a specific type of person.

To be completely vulnerable, I agree with this notion. I read in public while silently wishing I were on my phone, because I want to be perceived as disciplined, thoughtful, better. And I’m fairly certain most people my age are performing that same illusion.

_{Or it is only me. Only. I. Am. Obsessed. With. How. I. Am. Perceived. (gulp…anxiety swells, the Jaws theme starts playing (is it just me hearing this? surely not). I feel the urge to explain myself. I have got to stop this.)}

I am better than you because I am reading, therefore engaging my brain, therefore forming synaptic connections, therefore smarter. And here lies the crux of the ideology: reading as moral and intellectual superiority.

Because it makes you seem smart. But reading, in and of itself, does not make you smart. <- overused sentence!

What you read makes you smart.

(Hello mom 👋 , my singular reader left on this page).

Can you read a history textbook? Can you read this amateur blog post on this very much nondescript website? Doing the first one might actually be an indicator of your IQ. Doing the latter, may be an indication of your ability to justify any reading as productive. Doing both? Well that would create the intersection of two circles that have sat idly beside each other for all of history. So congrats on making history! You single handedly created the venn-diagram between my readers and historians.

Just reached for my phone to take a Tik Tok break. Wow.

Because of this thought I have an issue. And the main pain point is no one is going to read, because reading is no longer an act of leisure but a forcible habit to make you better. And when relaxing no one wants to be made better they want a bag of Cheetos, Diet Coke, and screen time.

I come to you as someone who wants to create something meaningful in this world and I want to do it through a medium I myself do not find engaging, presumably because of the aforementioned distortion of reading within the modern era. (hello dissertation title.)

To clarify, my desire to create within this medium does not arise from that distortion; rather, it is my aversion to engaging with the medium that does.

Therefore, I feel guilt in expecting other people to engage with my “writing” on a platform that is far less engaging than its competitors, while simultaneously recognizing that I probably wouldn’t read this either.

_{Or maybe I would, which may be precisely why I feel so compelled to write it, even as the gnawing sense that it means nothing lingers just beneath the surface.}

So we come to the paradoxical question of what makes my creation worth creating in the first place? Is it the act of creating that is enough for this to mean something or is it the interaction between another person and this work that makes it worth creating?

Is paradoxical the right word? (Pause for a quick google)

Paradoxical: For a statement to be paradoxical, two conditions must be mutually exclusive, they cannot both be true at the same time. Therefore, to conclude that the statement above is paradoxical, we would have to claim that a work cannot derive meaning both from the act of its creation and from another person’s interaction with it.

So…no it is not paradoxical.

**Note on previously made statement: So we come to the paradoxical question of what makes my creation worth creating in the first place? Is it the act of creating that is enough for this to mean something or is it the interaction between another person and this work that makes it worth creating?

I suppose we will come to find out.

I hope that reading makes a come back not as an indicator of intelligence but as a form of pleasure as easily accessible and engaging as the scroll. Because this will mean, of course, people will read my work. Because they want to escape their thoughts for a little while and do so through an enjoyable act.

TL;DR:

I want to create something meaningful through writing, even though I personally find reading online increasingly unengaging in the modern, scroll-driven era. I feel conflicted asking others to engage with my work when I’m not sure I would do the same, and I question whether meaning comes from creation itself or from being read. Still, I hope reading can return to being a form of pleasure rather than performance, because if it does, this might matter after all.