My dog has diarrhoea, and it’s driving me mad. It is a particular kind of diarrhoea reserved, I am convinced, for the moments in our lives when things are just starting to ease off: when my university semester ends, when we’re finally home after weeks away, when a big work project has at last been delivered. I say it is a particular kind of diarrhoea because it is nocturnal: it only appears at night. Every hour, from sundown to sunrise, our little bundle of nervous energy begins to scream (and it is truly a scream) and must be let out into the yard to eke out a teaspoon or so of shapeless slop. In the morning, with the sun risen and her digestive tract apparently all dried up, she will settle down to sleep and won’t have any trouble until sundown.

The first time it came on, we were unprepared. Assuming the first few screams were simply one-offs, we would send her back to her crate and head back to bed. It soon became clear that sleeping in the crate, with the screaming it required to get our attention, was no match for hourly bathroom trips. We relented and allowed her to sleep in the bed with us, taking turns letting her out when she stirred.

This solution worked as well as it could until, re-entering the bedroom in the dark one night at about 3 am, I smelled something concerning. I am particularly sensitive to and alarmed by bad smells, and never more so than in my bedroom in the dead of night. I flicked on the light and discovered the source: she had stepped in her own mess out in the yard, traipsed it all through the house, and into our bedsheets.

Hot wash, new sheets, dog in the bath, back to bed for twenty minutes until the next run. After that, paws are washed in the tub upon re-entering the house. Each morning, we rise in a daze, unsure how exactly we will make it through the day or whether we will ever think about anything other than our dog’s diarrhoea.

If I dare to mention it to friends, the obvious comparison is never far from the conversation. How will you go with a baby? they ask, concerned that I seem unfit to go even a handful of nights sleeping in 45-minute increments. I can practically mouth the words as they are spoken, so predictable is the question. I laugh it off but secretly wonder the same thing.

Does my fatigue after even a single night of interrupted sleep mean I am unfit for parenthood? Does my frustration with her dysfunctional digestive system — something entirely outside of her control — reveal an incapacity for unconditional love?

I have been waiting years for motherhood and I am still not ready for it. I’m not writing enough. Not cooking enough. Not able to go more than twenty-four hours without the kitchen counter clogging up with dishes.

I spend too much money, mostly on books. I am an inconsistent presence at the gym. The latest technological innovation is threatening my only source of income. My pile of books to be read — and in reality it is several piles, a bookcase, and an online shopping cart — only grows.

And maybe these are the inconsequential things. There are other things that concern me even more. I am sure that I am not learned enough. Not journeyed enough. Most definitely not patient enough, not lighthearted enough. I am tight-fisted with praise but quick to criticise. I am, most of the time, not outgoing enough, relaxed enough, assertive enough.

Of all the reasons I am unfit for motherhood, my inability to cope with a dog with an upset stomach is perhaps the least of them.

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The late luteal phase is the last week of the menstrual cycle. For me, it is the week that offers the last few remnants of hope that I might indeed be pregnant this time, before it delivers the cramping, agitation, and entirely unreasonable sense of despair that is my clue that I am, once again, not pregnant. One of my special late-luteal-phase symptoms is what is called sleep maintenance insomnia. If, during this last week of my cycle, something wakes me from my sleep, I will not sleep again for at least several hours. Before I discovered the hormonal cause of this disorder, it frequently drove me mad. Now, despite the fatigue that follows, I have learned to embrace these quiet hours of night wakefulness.

Last Christmas, for instance, I spent several witching hours in front of the Christmas tree lights, a mince pie and a glass of almond milk and a book illuminated by my clip-on light. So far, my dog’s curious night-time diarrhoea appears to only visit during the late luteal, which means each trip outside for her leads to several hours of wakefulness for me. Since there are no Christmas lights in July, my nighttime indulgence at the moment is Don Quixote — the gift that keeps on giving. I am reading this tale of the delusional knight errant in the yellow rocking chair I bought from Marketplace. A comfortable spot to nurse the baby, I had figured, though of course there is no baby yet, and I, like Don Quixote de la Mancha, surely have no reason to be as hopeful about the future as I am. Like the misguided knight, I have read too many books and thought for too long about pursuing the very path many people say ruins them. It may well be a delusion, but beneath all the anxiety and self-doubt, something inside me is convinced not only that it will someday happen, but that I may even be alright at it when it does.

And perhaps, unlike Don Quixote, I do have some evidence to offer up for my delusions.

When the nocturnal diarrhoea visits us, our lives become oriented around the evasive and unpredictable movements of a tiny creature’s digestive tract. We have a night-time diarrhoea system in place now, sleeping in shifts with the help of the spare bedroom. I am in the kitchen — a rare sighting — cooking appropriately bland fish (no chicken; it doesn’t sit well with her) and rice (brown or white? Does it need more flavour?). I am at the chemist buying unflavoured fibre supplements to bulk out her stools. I am scouring the internet, investigating safe options for restoring her electrolytes (her skin is a little slow to snap back when pinched, her gums a little tacky), sourcing probiotics, calculating dog-safe doses of human medications.

I am keeping a detailed record of where we’ve been and what she may have been exposed to. I am noting the timings, texture, and colour of her bowel movements — photographing them for posterity. I’m peppering my poor sister, a fourth-year veterinary student, with questions.

The nocturnal diarrhoea, when it arrives, takes over our lives. Perhaps this is because we want it to end, but perhaps it is also because we love her. Yes, I am frustrated — I couldn’t look the vet in the eye when he refused to prescribe her antibiotics today. I am exhausted. I occasionally pretend I haven’t heard her stir in the night, just to see if my partner will get to her first. But I will take her outside every hour and cook her meals and return to the vet, more assertive this time, until we get to the bottom of this.

Despite the incessant chatter in my head about all the reasons I am unfit to bring a human life into the world, I will, at least this time, resist adding my dog’s night-time diarrhoea to the list. This latest instalment of the diarrhoea in the night-time has, especially in the wee hours, made me question my fitness for parenting. On the other hand, it has proven to me that I can be exhausted, frustrated, confused, even a little delusional — and carry on anyway.

In recent years, the sense that my online interactions — on social media, in my work inbox, even Zoom calls — constituted genuine human-to-human interactions has become increasingly tenuous. Now, with AI infiltrating seemingly every article, post, and email (and, apparently, even video calls), the very idea of finding a sense of humanity online has effectively disappeared.

Being as I am happily self-employed, I spend an unfortunate amount of time on LinkedIn (one must earn one’s freedom somehow). If AI has ruined any platform, it is undoubtedly LinkedIn. Virtually every post is now dripping with AI’s signature over-dramatic and underwhelming style.

The slopfest that is LinkedIn has gotten so bad that even a post (mine) breaking down AI’s uninspiring style is met with comments like this one:

Yep, AI. (This guy subsequently sent me a connection request, with a fully AI-generated message that made zero sense. What exactly he was hoping to gain, I can’t fathom.)

So yeah, at this point, as someone who actually rather enjoys my little writing job and is particularly sensitive to the shitty written content clogging up our shared spaces, I’d certainly be happy to never hear about AI ever again, or at least until it cures cancer. As a person who likes to make things and believes the process is kind of, well, the whole point, the propaganda around AI is so uninspiring that it borders on terrifying, and has sent people like me burrowing further into the ground.

There are so many things we want more than AI right now — a house, maybe; an atmosphere not breaching 430 ppm; bees and glaciers and enough time in the day to feel human.

Some months ago I wrote about William Zinsser’s four principles of good non-fiction writing: clarity, brevity, simplicity, humanity. Briefly:

• Clarity: What are you actually trying to say? This should win out over everything else, including the principles below.

• Brevity: Keep it as short as possible (but no shorter — more on that below).

• Simplicity: Over-complicating obscures the truth.

• Humanity: Be, like, a real person, if possible.

I also keep coming back to Derek Thompson’s summary of Neil Postman’s arguments about television’s communication style: immediacy, emotion, spectacle, brevity. In Everything is Television, Thompson maps these characteristics neatly onto the rise of algorithmic media, which he contends is converging from all sides into a river of short-form video. Let’s unpack these in contrast to Zinsser’s principles:

• Immediacy: Quick, fast, no time to think. Everything is urgent.

• Emotion: Extreme emotional responses = higher engagement.

• Spectacle: The Mr Beast principle. If you’re not over the top, you’re not getting seen.

• Brevity: Shorter than Zinsser would want. So short that it oversimplifies; that it keeps us from asking deeper questions.

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And yet I think television, in all its insidious permutations, is no longer our only source of confusing and uninspiring content — especially not at work. Today we are also dealing with, yes, those great big hulking LLMs.

Inspired by Zinsser and Postman and Thompson, I have identified four key characteristics of the universal LLM communication style (and for some reason it is universal): ambiguity, verbosity, complexity, and homogeneity. Yes, these are Zinsser’s principles flipped for the worse.

• Ambiguity: Reach no real conclusions, take no real risks, leave the reader with no groundbreaking takeaways.

• Verbosity: This is part of what makes LLM outputs so ambiguous, but it’s also truly exhausting. LLMs don’t get tired like we do. They’ll go for days, or until the tokens run out.

• Complexity: Also part of what makes it so verbose. With too much material to work with, it will either go deep into the weeds and immediately overcomplicate the topic at hand, or, when asked to simplify, revert back to surface-level ambiguity.

• Homogeneity: It simply cannot sound original. No matter which of the platforms you use or creative prompts you feed it, there is an AI odour that surrounds even the briefest of AI-created copy.

I think it’s worth recognising the gap between the principles of good communication and the general style of what AI tends to produce. I’m not saying AI can’t be helpful in meeting one or many of Zinsser’s criteria. Sometimes it does produce a handy analogy or a simple way of thinking about or communicating something that might genuinely make your communications better.

But for the most part, AI is being used injudiciously in the corporate world, and the platforms are now drowning in content that is ambiguous, verbose, complex, and homogeneous. And really, really dull.

Most of the AI-generated content out there is designed to pursue commercial ends. Now that AI is available to the men in suits, we’re seeing an even greater divide between work produced for business purposes and work produced for the pleasure of calling it art. The divide was always apparent thanks to the takeover of corporate communications by weasel words and legal-team-approved word salad, but it’s about to explode.

What a fatal dichotomy this is: the idea that commerce and art must remain in separate domains. I contend that, in the face of growing brand voice homogenisation (every company now sounds like ChatGPT) and the ease of having simple questions answered by an AI overview rather than navigating to individual webpages and piecing together a research puzzle, the only sane strategy for a company to take to differentiate (at least in the world of content and educational marketing) is to embrace marketing as art. This has long been the winning ticket in advertising, but now other modes of marketing, particularly those designed primarily to educate, will need to adopt this approach.

This means the content marketer’s job in the age of AI overload may no longer be to inform or educate but rather to inspire and to encourage and to entertain. To make content that promises more than a simple transactional experience of search and query. To make something beautiful; something that stays with people long after they’ve closed the tab (or left it to dwell in multi-tab purgatory).

All of this really belongs inside Zinsser’s fourth principle: humanity. This is the realm of inspiration, passion, honesty, vulnerability, magic. This is the realm of art. So permit me one final list of four — a list I think businesses should keep in mind if they wish to gain traction in the age of machines:

• Inspire: Why create anything — marketing or not — if it doesn’t inspire? It doesn’t even have to be hopeful; a lot of great art is not particularly hopeful, but it should at least spark something a little deeper in your audience.

• Entertain: Many ways to do this: high-stakes tension, humour, vulnerability, personal anecdotes. Whatever makes for a good story.

• Authenticate: I’m taking some serious license with this verb. By authenticate, I mean letting a human voice come through unmistakably. With so much slop out there, you’ll probably need two-factor authentication: being doubly personal so that your audience immediately grasps that this is not slop.

• Connect: The flipside of authenticating yourself is reaching out to your audience. Acknowledge they exist, acknowledge who they are, acknowledge the context in which they’re operating. On the Internet we have a tendency to shout into the void, but the best art knows its audience (as it happens, so does the best marketing).

The takeaway here is that the divide between commerce and art is a false one. If businesses want to stand out in a world where everything is AI, the best bet is to avoid the most efficient, corporate route to production (the Adam Smith pin factory model) and instead embrace the only thing worth fighting for: art.

I am becoming increasingly suspicious of claims that new technologies will make our lives easier. I don’t deny that they can make certain tasks easier. But recent history shows that many of us will attempt, in our own time, to make up for what our machines propose to do for us during the day.

We’ve all heard about the dangers of cognitive offloading in the context of generative AI. (Yes, I’m sorry, this is an article about AI.) I contend that what is offloaded will eventually need to be reloaded if we are to have any sense of meaning in our lives.

Many people, I’m sure, will embrace AI with few questions. If the now-famous MIT study is anything to go by, their cognitive capacities will decline. Others — the ones, for better or worse, hell-bent on not letting this technology destroy their minds, their sense of personhood — will need to carve out additional time in their already packed schedules in order to rewrite what AI is threatening to overwrite.

I heard this idea some months ago on Cal Newport’s podcast. People who wish to safeguard their cognitive capacities under the onslaught of AI, Newport says, will have to get highly intentional about using their brains in other settings. Reading, writing, Sudoku — any activity that requires sitting down to take your brain seriously. He compares this to the way many of us now spend our mornings or evenings in the gym to combat days spent at the desk.

It is a classically Newportian thing to say and may get some of us fired up and ready to train our brains. But we need to put this in context. Any cognitive re-loading we plan out for ourselves will need to be added to the exhausting list of to-dos already weighing down our lives, which are there largely to counteract the things technology has made easier for us.

In this context, AI is not the first but rather the latest step in a series of innovations that would seem to make things easier for us, but end up asking much more of us if we are determined to live a meaningful life. Like the Red Queen, we will have to run faster and faster simply to stay in place. Try harder and harder to offset the corrosive effects of the technologies we have willingly or unwillingly introduced in our lives.

The modern world, for better and worse, invites us to offload. Once, we ploughed fields and melted widgets in furnaces, and now machines do it. Once, we made our own bread and butter and vegetable soup, and now companies like Nestlé make our food for us. We’ve seen what this combination has led to. Fighting with a food system designed to exploit our basic biology, many of us now set some kinds of rules around what we eat, count the components, tally up the protein. Where our grandparents may have eaten what was available simply because it was available, many of us now eat with intention. Similarly, now that many of us put our brains to work rather than our bodies, we carve out time in the schedule for cardio, strength training, mobility, you name it. We have workout schedules and personal trainers and 12-week goals for improving on this or that.

And now, the rise of AI, at home but especially in the workplace, means that, if things play out the way Sam Altman and his buddies want them to, we will no longer be using our brains at work, either. Those who say, “well, just don’t use it”, have either not experienced the reality of working for a corporation in 2026, where AI usage itself has become a KPI, or considered AI in the context of other addictive technologies like social media, where “just don’t use it” is a daily battle.

Lest I be taken for another delusional millennial, let me be clear. There is no era I would rather live in. I am beyond grateful for my computer job, my instant oats, my effortless access to antibiotics. The painting at the top of this essay is called Monday Morning; I saw it recently in a gallery and was breathless with gratitude that my Monday mornings look nothing like it.

So I am not claiming that we should reject all technology and innovation, Yesteryear-style. What I am hoping to do through this essay is not to complain but to explain; to put resisting the effects of cognitive offloading in its context. To give a voice to the feeling that many of us feel guilty for having: our lives have been made so much easier for us, so much better, and yet somehow we are more exhausted than ever.

Not everything in the past was better, but not everything new technology promises is necessarily an improvement. Amid the LinkedIn-bro hype of what we stand to gain, it is worth understanding what we may lose when we adopt a new technology. That is, if we wish to move forward with any sense of sanity, or, rather, humanity.

What has so far gone unacknowledged in the discussions of ‘brain gyms’ and ‘exercises for the mind’ is that having to bring intention to everything we do in life — to have to schedule friend hangouts, block out time for the gym, track or our protein intake, carve out activities to keep our brains active — is nothing short of exhausting. It is not the effort itself that is so tiring (though it is, of course), but the intention behind it. To have to think so much and so constantly about all the ways in which our daily lives make us deficient and to schedule time and pluck energy from somewhere to attempt to fortify what is being eroded by powers beyond our control. Eve Rodsky claims that a task is not just its execution but also its conception and planning — two largely invisible elements, often shouldered by women in domestic settings, with very real consequences. The age of intention adds another layer to conception and planning: a sense of having to harness dwindling willpower to work on something that feels like it shouldn’t be this hard.

Yes, there is a fatigue that comes from work that requires physical labour, social interaction, or cognitive demand; but there is perhaps an even greater fatigue in clicking around for eight hours at a time while the technology executes our to-do list, in order to rush home at the end of the day to squeeze back in all the capacities the technology has taken from us.

Perhaps some of us really don’t mind automating our brains at work. Perhaps we felt close to an automaton already, and the introduction of AI has somehow made it easier and more bearable. Perhaps there is a fraction of people who really won’t mind automating their work brains and tuning up their cognitive abilities in their own time with things that interest them. But I sense that, for most of us, the art of engaging intellectually with our work is often the only thing that makes it bearable. (This is a subject for another essay.)

To take us back to the start: I admire Newport’s thinking on the subject. I think he’s technically correct that combatting AI-driven cognitive erosion would require significant skill-building or skill-maintaining in our off-time. I think it’s probably the best advice we can give when so many people now have no choice but to use AI at work. And I know that Newport would prefer knowledge workers not to use AI, or at least not to use it in such a way that outsources their thinking and eventually melts their mental capacities. But I want to put this concept of intentionally training your brain to offset AI’s effects into the broader context of our already busy, tiring, highly intentional lives.

Do we really need another destructive social technology whose corrosive effects, we are told, will require personal responsibility and intention to combat?

Whatever productivity gains AI might offer at a global level, we must think hard about whether, as individuals, the benefits of removing something that must then, later that day or week or lifetime, be added back.

I think I’d feel the same way if I didn’t already read, so here I’ll show you a few examples of when and where I read.

Let it also be known: I don’t have children. I don’t want this essay to make anyone feel bad. I’m just spreading the message that books can go anywhere phones go, if you want them to :)

Let’s get started.

I read in the obvious places: libraries, bookstores, cafes, bed.

I read on planes, trains, streetcars, and boats.

I read in cars, but mostly audiobooks, since I’m wired for motion sickness.

Actually, thanks to audiobooks, I can now take my books to even more places: morning walks around the city, long hikes on the weekends, the picnic table at the dog park to make sure my little nuisance isn’t, well, making a nuisance.

I’ve heard Cal Newport talk about the Rory Gilmore method: never leaving home without a book in your hand. That’s basically the Amelia Zimmerman method too, although my combination of Kobo and Libro.fm means I’m usually dragging 250+ books out the door with me, and it all weighs less than a stick of butter.

I read at my desk between meetings, in the foyer at the vet clinic, and for hours on end during the occasional ER visit.

I read at restaurants, boring sports games, casual family hangouts, and vacations. I’m not purposefully antisocial, but when people start doing their own thing, or before they’re up in the morning, I’m straight into a book.

I even read during my Canadian Citizenship ceremony — there were some long waits during that one.

I’m fortunate to travel regularly, so I read in taxis, airports, and queues for tourist attractions, which are always excruciatingly hot and poorly organised.

I even read in hot air balloons.

I read so much I now need glasses for anything further away than a book — although I do also spend a regrettable amount of time on my laptop.

I read on the couch, on the patio, and occasionally in a hammock on vacation.

I love reading by water — the pool, the beach, or on the verandah with the rain pelting down.

On slow weekends, I’ll read in my yellow reading chair.

And every year, on my birthday, I let myself read all day. This year, my 30th, I read The Extinction of Experience.

I’m a bookworm, but not the sort who loves to stay holed up in her room. On the contrary, I need to get out frequently. The best part about living in bookland is that books, as Stephen King says, are a uniquely portable magic. They transport us to new places and perspectives, and they can also easily and cheaply be transported especially in a digital world.

Many of the insights and realisations I’ve had while reading are tied in my memory not just to the book and the author, but also to the location where they occurred to me.

Where travel cannot take you, books can.

But books do more than let us escape the world we live in.

They also help us make sense of it.

I love this clip of Ronny Chieng explaining the breakdown of America.

That’s why reading matters — and when I talk about reading, I’m talking about real books. Wide-ranging books. Not just BookTok romances or Atomic Habits.

Not everyone can or wants to read as much as I do. But everyone should read a little. Enough to understand where we’ve come from and where we might go. To grasp what it might be like to be born at a different time, in a different place, under different circumstances.

This is what smartphones, the internet, social media, was supposed to do. To show us how others live, to get us to connect better, to help us understand each other. Instead, it has divided us, confused us, enraged us, and exhausted us.

And so I think it’s time we put down the phones and picked up something a little longer. Something that takes more work to produce and more effort to consume. Something that is, ultimately, a little more human.

Every time I hear some social media influencer tell people to kickstart a 'reading habit' by reading one, or five, or ten pages a night, a little part of me dies.

Maybe it's a personality thing. I hate the current mania with microhabits: flossing one tooth, repping out one pushup, washing one whole dish. I get it — I get why it’s popular advice (people are overwhelmed) and why James Clear sold so many damn copies of Atomic Habits (buying a book is an easy way to feel like you’re changing your life — especially one like this). But I also hate it. I hate that the only way to get people to do things is to render it so laughably easy that it is also entirely pointless.

But back to reading. Here's why I don't like the 10 pages a night rule, and why I think it's actually really bad advice.

Firstly, it frames reading as a chore. Something that’s painful but good for you; something to endure so you can get the end result. The good news is that if you mark your progress by counting the pages, you can limit your suffering to just 10 pages a night! It’ll barely hurt at all!

Why would we want to set people up with this kind of mentality toward reading? If you want people to read, don't you want them to enjoy it? There is no inherent moral value in ‘reading’ for reading’s sake — it’s just a really enjoyable way to spend your time and it also has the added benefit of giving you better context and nuance for navigating life. I don't think you should read if you don't enjoy it (well, to tell the truth, I think you should find a way to enjoy it). If you have to count pages to mentally make it through your 'reading time', you're not sinking into the book — and the best part about reading is sinking in. If this is how you're going to approach reading, you're better off finding a different activity that doesn't feel like a chore.

Secondly, good reading is deep, fully-zoned-out-from-the-rest-of-the-world reading. It’s what happens when you’re so invested in the material that the content itself is what carries you along — not the thought of how many pages you’re getting through. Good reading is what happens when you look up thinking you’ve only been there fifteen minutes, and it’s been an hour and a half.

You can’t reach this feeling after one or five or even ten pages. It takes time to enter the world of a book. It takes time for your brain to switch everything else off and build a new reality for itself to exist in. If you’re stopping before you even get to this good feeling, you’re going to think reading doesn’t feel very good — because it often doesn’t, in those first few pages. Not when you’ve just finished a 2X speed YouTube video that you watched while scrolling Instagram and boiling the kettle. Give it a minute — or a half-hour, maybe. But certainly more than ten pages.

Thirdly, it’s the wrong way to get started. I get the idea these books and influencers are trying to push: that the point of these little one-bite habits is to just get you started — to lure you into eating the full-course meal. And maybe this makes sense for something like flossing, which is a very straightforward process that is incredibly boring and looks the same for everyone. But it doesn’t make sense for reading. It focuses on the wrong thing. Telling people to read 10 pages a night jumps straight to the act of reading (actually, it jumps straight to quantifying the results of your reading activity) rather than starting with what matters: why do you want to read? Is there something you want to learn about? Do you remember a time when reading was part of your life, and you loved how it made you feel? Is it just something you feel like you should be doing because it’s ‘broccoli for your brain’ or some such nonsense?

Any advice on how people can build a ‘reading habit’ (I’m always going to put this in quotes because why does everything have to be a habit? Why can’t we just have things we enjoy?) should focus on what you’re reading, not how much or when or how you’re reading.

What is the right way to get started?

The right way to get started with a reading habit is not to focus on the medium (i.e. stop thinking about reading) and start focusing on subject matter: What are you interested in? What are you watching on YouTube right now? Which influencers do you follow on Instagram? What are you talking about with your friends or bingeing on Netflix? Books are not mysterious black boxes — they’re just vessels for information and stories. You’re already consuming things you’re interested in via other formats, so look at books as an extension of these interests and not a replacement or the polar opposite of whatever you’re into. Follow your interests, not what everyone supposedly says is a classic. If some bro influencer or a guy at work tells you that The 48 Laws of Power changed his life, look at him with suspicion—and then head to the part of the bookstore that interests you.

Look, as with any new endeavour in life, there are two ways to approach this: the hard way, and the fun way. If you want to get fit and you hate running, you could start running. Plenty have done it before you — and there’s even a small chance that you’ll eventually morph from a running-hater to a running-lover. But why put up with all that misery along the way? Why not just pick something you already like?

It’s exactly the same with reading. If you tally up your five pages a night by hitting yourself over the head with the latest Ryan Holiday release or David Goggins torture manual or some tired 20th century advice for getting rich, you might eventually become a voracious reader who can’t think of anything better than sinking into their TBR. But why approach that way in the first place? I guarantee I can turn almost anyone into a voracious reader overnight simply by handing them something they’re actually into.

Trust me, there’s a book for everyone. And it doesn’t have to be an aggressively masculine self-help book — although there are plenty of those, if you hadn’t already noticed.

Reading is not like other things

Some things in life do need a little structure to them. You really do need to clean your teeth twice a day. You do need to hit the gym with a certain volume and frequency for anything to come of it. But reading comes with far fewer requirements and constraints. Reading can be whatever you want it to be. You can read wherever, whenever, however, and whatever you like. Unlike other valuable pursuits in life, it doesn’t have to be a habit — it can just be part of your life.

I consider myself a serious reader: I get through at least 100 books a year — but what’s more important is I enjoy them. If you ask the people in my life whether I have a ‘reading habit’, they’d say yes, but they’d be much more likely to describe it as a hobby, or an interest, or a passion, than a ‘habit’. A habit is a depressingly clinical way to describe something that can bring this much joy and open up so much of the world to you. Flossing is a habit. Reading is a joy.

I only have one rule around my reading: if you’re interested, read it. If not, ditch it. If I’ve just bought a book and I hate it 50 pages in, it’s gone. If I just started one book but suddenly become wildly interested in another topic, I’ll put it down for a while to pick up the other. This does lead to a lot of books getting temporarily or permanently abandoned. But it also means I almost never have a bad time reading. I care far more about my reading experience than my reading stats — and unfortunately, many of the influencers out there telling you to read every night would rather you tick off 52 books on your Goodreads this year than sink into five incredible books that you can’t stop thinking and talking about.

Influencers often talk about reading as being like ‘the gym for your mind’ or ‘broccoli for your brain’ — seriously, what a way to turn people off reading. Scrap that. Reading is not the gym, and it’s not broccoli. Reading is your rest day after a week of training. It’s the dessert you wait for at the end of the main course. Reading is the fun part — not the tough part.

A better way to build a reading habit

If you had ‘read 10 pages a night’ on your resolutions list, scratch it off now. There’s a better way to get this thing off the ground. Block off a weekend morning and take yourself to a bookstore or library. On your way there, have a think about what you’re interested in at the moment. What are you trying to achieve in other parts of your life? What’s a true story you heard recently that made your jaw drop, or a little fantasy world you’d love to escape to right now?

In the bookstore, take your time. This is not a book-finding mission, it’s a reconnaissance exercise. It’s your chance to breathe it in and soak it up. Just enjoy being there. Appreciate the atmosphere. Flip through the books, read the back covers, see what leads to what. Whip out your phone and use the Internet as a little helper if it’s difficult to follow a coherent trail in the store — read about the authors, see what else they’ve published, look up the top books on a particular subject.

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Why reading (the right way) feels so good

The beauty of allowing yourself to really read something (and not just count the pages) is the feeling of mental stimulation without overstimulation. Our brains are constantly seeking new things to engage with, but with all the noise in our modern world, they also need a break from the buzz. The book, the paragraph, the well-crafted sentence, heck, even just black words on a white page: it’s the perfect amount for our brains to take in without feeling overwhelmed. It’s almost like the written word was perfectly designed to meet our brains where they’re at. They give us a job to do (focus on something, understand information, make mental pictures), without asking us to do it at an unnatural pace or bombarding us with flashing lights and colours and sounds and all sorts of excess stimuli. It’s the perfect mix of taxing and relaxing.

Reading is a little like tea here — the perfect combination of caffeine (stimulating) and L-theanine (has calming properties, among others). A cup of tea will calm you down if you're stressed, or pick you up if you're tired. If you let it, a good book will do the same. But not if you're counting the pages.

Alright, enough from me. My Kobo is calling.

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