I’m a bad reader so I feel like every book I read feels like work. I’m trying Machiavelli right now. It’s been especially hard since some people are arguing the entire book is written satirically or as intended bad advice to thwart a political opponent, which leaves me wondering “Why am I reading this if it’s meaning is ultimately unclear and still debated?” But I’ve read enough to know that every once in a while, you stumble upon a golden phrase or idea that totally reshapes the way you see the world, so I guess that’s what I’m doing. Basically mining for diamond.
Thanks for sharing that thought. My struggle with reading is that I tend to forget what I've read fairly quickly, which has led me to question the point of my reading altogether. Although I like your idea of mining for diamonds. It really does only take a few words to materially impact one's worldview. Also, I figure, even if I'm not able to consciously retrieve an idea I've read at will, I'm sure it impacts my subconscious being - which seems to tie in with OP's "you can only cook what's in the fridge".
thought I'd replied to this but must have forgotten to send it. love the idea of mining for diamonds. there are a few phrases or moments that have stuck with me and shape my daily activity (things like negative/positive freedom, the golden mean, stephen covey's four quadrants). and those make all the effort worth it, even IF the process of reading wasn't beneficial in and of itself. (although I do think it is. for reasons we will discuss soon.)
@@soycrates totally feel what you mean about forgetting what we read. to your last point about subconscious being - I read somewhere (although I forget where!) that "the books you read are like the meals you eat. even if you can't remember what you ate specifically, they determine who you end up as". the books you've read, even when you forget them, shaped the decisions you made and the thoughts you had at that time in your life, which in turn shaped who you are now. (And something that I've found helps with forgetting is just having all the most important books on my piano, where I see them daily. It's like the sub-bookshelf of Most Important Books.) Thanks for watching!
you’re gonna make it to the big leagues, keep on going with your unique and creative style and cultivating a loyal following, and you’ll make it! good luck out there ❤
“Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?” was my hardest book. I can’t imagine that more than 4 people on earth are smart enough to understand all of it. Yet…we slogged through all of it in a philosophy of science class and we learned so many things: humility, wonder, and a thousand physics terms. We grew tremendously. The professor knew the class really struggled with the book, and so he asked if he should use it again the next time he taught and, much to his surprise, we (the ones who read) said yes!
Recently, I've been enjoying reading books in languages that I am still learning. I find it pleasantly humbling to work through a book that would be effortless if it were in my native language. I don't absorb as many new concepts as are described in this video, but I still learn a lot by challenging myself to assemble concepts based on a limited, non-fluent base of language knowledge. The effort reminds me of when I was learning to read as a kid, and every book was a challenge to comprehend - I think the endeavor makes me appreciate the very act of reading, which I would normally take for granted.
that sounds like a whole new level of difficulty but sounds really rewarding. Love the idea of bringing it back to when everything was a little hard to understand.
I'm currently in the process of reading a book on handling money called "The Richest Man in Babylon". It was originally published in the 1930s and the topics it explores are pretty dense so it's taking me a while to get through it. I have found that annotation is a useful way of understanding and retaining what you read. When I first started annotating, I kind of felt like I was vandalizing the book, but I'm getting more used to the idea. Books are made for you to enjoy and learn from; how can you do that if you can't understand what you're reading? Yay for George S. Clason! ~Teddie using Nat's account :)
great point. I don’t write in my books very often, but whenever I reread a book that I DID write in, I’m always glad because it helps me remember which parts I liked most and what past me thought of them.
Think what's interesting is that AI telling versus own reading is kind of the point of Walden. Thoreau's saying that the important thing is that a person needs to think for themselves on what is a best life and not just blindly accept what is told them and taught them by society or the common norm. Same would go for AI. Someone or something else telling you what is is never going to be as useful and as accurate as what would be found by long and hard self contemplation and thought. Ultimately it's not about the reading but about the thinking. Knowledge is our only defense for what's happening now and what's coming.
Wild that I stumble across this series/video as I'm in the middle of my first read through of Walden. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who finds he needs time to work through it 😂 I'm just past the first 100 pages, and it has definitely been a struggle to dissect and comprehend large passages at times due to the antiquity of the language and his tendency to ramble and go on tangents, but it feels very rewarding once (after two or three re-reads of a passage) I finally understand what Thoreau is saying. And it's even more rewarding when I can pick apart what I agree with and what I disagree with, rather than taking everything he says at face value. Good ole Henry can be a cynical bastard at times lol. But the act of forcing myself to read material that doesn't come easy gives me a feeling that I don't think I've felt since middle school, which is the expansion my capacity to understand complex writing and thinking, and then to apply that complexity to my own writing and thinking. It's like the feeling when you were a kid where you picked up your first young adult novel after having only read chapter books - it makes you work harder for a more rewarding outcome, a more complex story, or a more complex philosophical expedition. Reading Walden inspires me to pick up more classics, more challenging reads, to practice deep understanding even more.
totally agree, Walden is definitely a wild read - philosophy and beans and accounting lists don’t usually all coincide, but here they do! Hope you enjoy the rest of it :)
I’m currently reading East of Eden and in chapter 13, Steinbeck profoundly laments the loss of the individual: “When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking” I loved your analogy about building our own mental houses -- it’s fruitful yet achievable, even amidst the busyness of our lives
such an amazing video! i feel like with the rise of AI, intelligence and simply doing things has become so undervalued. there’s such a beauty in doing things yourself-i don’t know why it’s so lost now :,( it’s so saddening to see. i hope people can see the beauty in taking things slow and putting in the work once more
agreed! it's the same with all tools. I think our goal shouldn't be to dismiss the tool entirely, but just to make sure they're serving us, not taking over things we would actually enjoy doing. here's a quote from Walden that I didn't include...but maybe should have: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven." Not entirely applicable to AI - but well phrased. thanks for watching!
Desiree by Annemarie Selinko. I pulled it out of a recycling bin and decided to keep it. It looked chonky and old and as far as I knew it was some obscure thing nobody else knew about. It was dense, too. It took me forever to work through it. Like, I often had to read one page and take a mini-break because otherwise my focus and attention span would fail, but I cried by the end of it. (Because emotions not frustration), and I love knowing just a little more about history.
isn’t one of the best parts of reading finding a book somewhere that wasn’t recommended to you, or suggested to you by an algorithm, and you have no clue at all if it’s going to be interesting? doesn’t feel like that happens often with other media. thanks for sharing!
Lately there have been a few books that I've really had to work through because I wasn't super duper interested in the content or the writing style, such as White Eskimo and Keeper of the Bees. Honestly, still haven't finished these yet BUT it's nice to try to read something that I normally wouldn't, and learn about things that I wouldn't ordinarily think about. On the other hand, I have LOVED working through a few Jane Austen novels recently. They took me longer to read and I had to piece some of it together because of the language (I remember reading one page three times before I comprehended haha). The stories were all so rewarding and well worth all of the time, mental energy, and tea that it took me to finish them. And how cool to learn about history by teleportation via book!
:) I started Sense & Sensibility yesterday and I had to read one paragraph like three times - it's deceptive because the words are all words I know, but the sentences are long and the structure is really elegant. Maybe Pride and Prejudice was easier for me since I'd read abridged version as a kid?
"If you want to really understand something, write about it." Even if you read a book, asking ChatGPT to summarize deprives you of internalizing it when writing / reflecting afterward. I have been writing notes as I read (not just books - articles and videos too) and stick them in a doc named "Notes on X". Writing notes takes more time but lessons appear out of the woodwork that didn't when first encountering the material.
I’m not kidding when I say making these videos has helped cement a lot of the topics into my mind. far more than when I’d just been thinking about them in my brain
As an avid philosophy reader that has pushed through Nietzsche, Camus and a bunch of other "complicated" writers. My main advice is to listen to RUclips essays about whatever writer/philosophy branch you're interested on, most of them will paraphrase the book. If you like and resonate with said phrase, go a step further and look up a YT video about that book or phrase, then try the book, if it's very hard and obnoxious, look up the main takeaways(preferably by humans since their inclinations help a lot in understanding philosophy), then, if you still like the book, continue reading it, by this time you'll have digested so many of the ideas behind it that you'll have a much easier time both enjoying and understanding it. Think of books as of a person, you can't really get to know anyone by just hearing about them, but you do need to be picky about which persons you dedicate time to get to know.
Ever since chatgbt came out it’s given me 1984, we’re all going to be using newspeak, vibes if all of our youth who are in school take the two hits of a) going down the route of using AI to essentially formulate their thoughts for them to serve the purpose of b) not being able to sit down, focus and read in the first place. All of this was so wonderfully put-thank you for the video.
I've recently read Moby Dick and I kept going back to whether it's worth it because it can be quite a pain but then it's so enjoyable at other times that it kept me going. I'm really glad I held out, it's a book about a long voyage at sea, it has to be long and a bit boring for you to understand how it feels, reading a summary would never have this effect. It also applies to other things, few months ago I decided to learn to knit by making a scarf, I picked a yarn based on the colour I liked and kind of missed how thin it is and how long it would take, I'm barely 1/4 through. As a crocheter it got me thinking whether it's worth it because knitting can be made by a machine (as opposed to crochet which is always handmade) so what is a point of spending hours upon hours when a machine could do it. But I want to makey own scarf even if it takes a year, in the end it makes me appreciate the work put into making things and puts me off buying fast fashion even more.
love this. I just got around to reading Moby Dick this year...totally relate to the "is it worth it" question! and yes process is just part of our experience as people...why handmake mugs or knit scarves or cook when you could just go buy that at the store? - because it's enjoyable. thanks for watching!
This is brilliant. When I enjoy a novel, I read very fast. When I’m desperate to find the answers, I have looked at wiki or supersummary for chapter summaries so I can get to the end quicker. I have this urgency sometimes with books. It takes effort for me to slow down. When I read the whole book, I remember much more about it. Because I have to live life between the pages - I can have discussions with my partner or friends/colleagues about what I’m reading. This helps me process what my thoughts and opinions are about the topics brought up within the book. I can draw parallels between other books, films, music and art. When I read summaries and explanations, I don’t remember as much information or plot. I’m not moved by the messages and learnings. I could write an A+ essay using study guides or ChatGPT, but I wouldn’t be able to have a compelling conversation over a glass of wine at a party. And that’s my life now as an adult, I want interesting conversations. I have no need for essay writing skills.
It’s almost like a book is already a summary or distillation of the author’s mind. a book summary is a summary of a summary. It can give the facts but you miss a lot. And you’re right - there’s no test.
I've been getting super into reading this past year. I've always struggled with it, but sometime last summer something just clicked in my brain, and suddenly I could read and enjoy reading, and I've been reading almost non-stop since. Part of it was allowing myself to read fiction. For a long while I sort of told myself that I had to read serious non-fiction books, that fantasy was trite and a waste of time, and it took me a while to realize that was super dumb, and that I love fantasy and horror and the surreal and all sorts of fiction. I just read through the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson, these 4 huge 1200+ page books, and I flew through those. But now I'm reading a book called The Rainbow Abyss by Barbara Hambly, a trim ~300 pages, and I am absolutely smitten with prose and the story and the characters so far, but for some reason it is just an absolute slog to read. It's so slow going. I can barely scrape through a chapter a night for some reason. When normally a 300 page book I could probably get through in a weekend, or a week if I'm going a bit slow. I dunno what it is, but it's annoying cause I am really enjoying everything about book!
so glad you’re giving yourself permission to read fiction!! I was put on to the Stormlight Archive and Brandon Sanderson last year by some friends and have been working my way through them. I began with the Mistborn books (enjoyed!) which I thought were long enough…. Now that I’m on the SA I see how wrong I was :) On Oathbringer now and loving it. Thanks for your thoughts!
A book i really had to work through was neuromancer. I originally put down neuromancer because the writing style was so difficult to process, but i returned to it a couple months later. I kept seeing it mentioned in the best science fiction books of all time lists, and was like damn…I feel like i’m missing out. I picked it back up and read it with the help of reading chapter summaries after reading the actual chapters just to make sure i had all of the characters, definitions, and settings correct. After finishing it, it kind of blew my mind how many science fiction movies and games pulled inspiration from it. Cyberpunk 2077, and blade runner of course being the most prominent. I think about the book pretty often, and even though it was hell to read at times, I still definitely appreciate the time I took to do so.
Also further adding to this for anyone who’s interested, reading super tough books makes future ones A LOT easier to break down and get immersed into. After reading Neuromancer and taking to process to understand everything i was reading; I read the house of leaves soon after and had no trouble at all with its insane world building and complex storyline. I’m now reading dune and can say the exact same thing. If I didn’t read Neuromancer, these books probably would’ve really pissed me off to be honest lmfao. But researching the terms and stories within the book you’re reading immerses you into the story more than any other form of media. The book kind of takes up your whole mind therefore really making you feel like you’re living within the story itself. it’s insane
yeah as soon as you start reading something it just keeps popping up all over the place…everywhere! like the world knows you’re reading this book now. thanks for watching!
Great insights on " Why read..." Yes, I agree , A tool is useful in many ways but we have to do the thinking . The thinking is in us and not in the tool. Chat GPT and all other AI are great tools ( Tools that help us with knowledge) . But they are not a substitute or replacement for our own insights, Reflections and thoughts . Information is transformed into knowledge only when it is churned and digested by our mind. Same goes for art. AI can mimic art but not create it as a real artist does , from the depths of their heart .
thanks for you thoughts! yeah agree - I enjoy thinking and creating, and I’d feel silly robbing myself of that joy. but still a useful tool in its way, and I’m sure we’ll see even more of it every year. Hopefully we navigate it well :)
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. That's the first book that made me think of stuff bigger than "what to wear tomorrow to school". It was the start of my mindpalace. I've read it 9 times. Love it.
Great content! Thank you so much for it! I’d suggest dialing the music down a bit, as just listening to the content without the captions is a bit difficult
that essay annecdote is quite pertinent, considering that essay literally means 'to say' and was invented as a genre of writing by Montaigne to express his thoughts on everything, from Cicero, On Sadness, On the resemblance of father's to children, of experience etc. His Essays, the first of their kind, was essentially the first blog. An unabashedly unfettered man expressing himself. When you read his essays, it really feels like having a conversation with the man. I'd recommend Donald Frame's translation, all others bring too much of the translator's personality in it. Also, here's something my friend once wrote on Thoreau, Emerson and theTranscendentalists. "Thoreau wanted to be Francis of Assisi but with American individualism and Transcendental authenticity substituted for Medieval piety and Christian humility. A proud and distant soul. He unfortunately promoted an economic ideal of self-sufficiency which even in his time approached total obsolescence, and the two World Wars along with the Cold War make it impossible for most people to really buy into the Transcendentalist notion that God is in each of us, and we recognize Him more as we become more like Him. Even in his time, I suspect, his unwillingness to play along with fledgling modernity doomed him to be an oddity. I think he was a man born either four hundred years too early or four hundred years too late. Emerson and Thoreau, I think, offered a version of existentialism that truly wished to transcend the false trappings of society, that found its sup and succor in being Godly, cultivating authenticity and virtue. Emerson and Thoreau had this idea that there is something of God inside of us, and insofar as we heed the call of it, rejecting all influences that would corrupt and mislead us, this Godliness would grow, and we'd become more capable of perceiving divinity. You can see the similarity to atheistic existentialism, like Sartre, Camus, even Heidegger to a degree. A profound emphasis on seeing how fatuous the narratives that drive the world are, how little they actually help us understand our own private experience, our own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Even Kierkegaard notes that it is so easy to lose oneself. Emerson and Thoreau were always going to have problems entering the philsophical mainstream. Part of it is that they're American and not European (the same thing happens to William James, who is perhaps the most staggeringly brilliant and beautiful mind of the 20th Century). But I think more galling to mainstream philosophy is the importance of the Transcendentalist doctrine of Providence. This is a Calvinist notion, the idea that God really does guide everything in our lives, that His hand is ever-present in everything. For Emerson and Thoreau, this was not an empty piety. They truly believed that they who saw the world correctly, as profuse with the divine, could see beauty in corpses and tragedies, psychedelically inferring glory in all things. As most philosophers, and most people, are incredulous towards the notion of Providence, transcendentalist thought just doesn't work. Thoreau just looks like a babbling schizo if you can't really believe there's a God who made you exactly who you are, and that like a flower, you're meant to blossom by listening to the impulses of your blood. Nope, go to Camus or Sartre or their adherents, say you need to be authentic because otherwise you're inauthentic and that's the path towards fascism."
Walden changed my life, especially his section on reading. Why wouldn’t I want to engage with the greatest minds in history? Every man would jump at silver coins but there are blocks of gold (classic books) sitting next to us everywhere.
what a great illustration! and yes... "this isn't actually something I want AI to do for me...this is something I enjoy". let the AI vacuum my house so I can go read books
I just realised that this is what I've always hated. I just graduated high school, so I'm intimately familiar with the idea of using ChatGPT for school assignments- at least, I'm familiar with others doing it. For reasons that I could never pinpoint, I just really hated using AI to write an essay. But now, I realised that I was looking for that process. I wanted to think for myself, I wanted to put in the work, and I wanted to be the one to express *my* thoughts. I didn't even realise that that was what I was doing, but I was. In the past few months, I've been doing quite a bit of self-reflection, and the topic of working (and especially of mental stimulation) has been really important in that reflection. And yet I didn't realise that I was the only one not using AI in my classes, all because I wanted to do the work. I never enjoyed the way things are taught in school, but subconsciously, I still motivated myself to learn and to work.
agree, learning can be pleasant! it can also be a drag for some people depending on how it’s presented, so I get the sentiment behind wanting to use AI. but also, I don’t. :)
Hi, Tim. This is just the second video of yours I have watched (coming here from the first reason to read), but I am already greatly enjoying your content and have subscribed. I stumbled across that first video while in a self-improvement video rabbit hole, but you've been able to reach me more effectively than any of the other creators I'd previously been listening to (not to pigeonhole your content into the "self-improvement" genre). I've been trying to incorporate regular reading into my life for years, so naturally this series of yours has spoken to me on a more personal level. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic about which you clearly care so deeply. Knowing that you are a teacher, I appreciate hearing your perspective on this that much more. I don't have an answer to your prompt at the end of the video, but your musings on ChatGPT and expression of our own thoughts struck me. I've never been much of a doomer when it comes to AI, but in thinking about the ways in which people have used it to outsource things as critical to our being and individualism as creativity, learning, and, in general, that *process* you allude to so often here in this video, I can't help but wonder where we're going as a society, and what we're teaching future generations, what values we're instilling in them. Students of all ages want to turn to AI to write their essays, I've heard several of my friends talk about how they use AI to write their emails or do their jobs for them (eye-roll)... what's next? And, piggybacking off of you, what are we clearing all of this headspace up for? Add to that the seemingly rampant oblivion-seeking and avoidance coping that takes the form of social media addiction and various other vices, less nuanced discourse surrounding important topics, etc., and I find myself slightly concerned about what the contents of peoples' mental fridges will be like in just a few years. Anyway, I'm rambling. There's no coherent or profound underlying point here to tie all of these anxious threads together. Most importantly, I just wanted to say thank you. I'm crawling out of a mental hole I've dug for myself through months of my own oblivion-seeking and deferring my attention outwards. I have long felt that reading is one tool that will help me turn things around, but haven't been able to understand why fully. Thank you for elucidating some of those reasons I haven't quite been able to articulate.
Thank you so much for this! I’m glad it’s being helpful for you :) Reading really is one super helpful tool and it’s been helpful in my life for a long time. so glad to have you around, thanks for the encouragement :) good luck on your journey of reclaiming your attention and embracing life - you got it!!
Couldn’t agree with this more. I’ve found I get different things from different styles of literature. What I gain from fiction is nothing like what I gain from nonfiction, and vice versa.
I’m never quite sure what I’m going to learn when I’m picking up a book, and I’m always pleasantly surprised. Even in nonfiction when I think I know what its supposed to teach me, I always learn something new. Thanks for watching!
I became an avid reader in August of '22-I was 38. I've read a hundred books since then and feel like I've only scratched the surface. These videos are resonating with me so much. Thank you for taking the time to put them together. 🙏
thanks so much for watching! I dropped by your site & saw your reads from this year - some of those are some of my very favorites! (Endurance by Alfred Lansing is a top tier book and I think about it all the time).
@@timdemoss it’s such an amazing book! I felt like I was right there with the crew the whole time. I recently picked up The Wager to continue my nautical itch lol
I’m a bad reader so I feel like every book I read feels like work. I’m trying Machiavelli right now. It’s been especially hard since some people are arguing the entire book is written satirically or as intended bad advice to thwart a political opponent, which leaves me wondering “Why am I reading this if it’s meaning is ultimately unclear and still debated?” But I’ve read enough to know that every once in a while, you stumble upon a golden phrase or idea that totally reshapes the way you see the world, so I guess that’s what I’m doing. Basically mining for diamond.
Thanks for sharing that thought. My struggle with reading is that I tend to forget what I've read fairly quickly, which has led me to question the point of my reading altogether. Although I like your idea of mining for diamonds. It really does only take a few words to materially impact one's worldview. Also, I figure, even if I'm not able to consciously retrieve an idea I've read at will, I'm sure it impacts my subconscious being - which seems to tie in with OP's "you can only cook what's in the fridge".
thought I'd replied to this but must have forgotten to send it. love the idea of mining for diamonds. there are a few phrases or moments that have stuck with me and shape my daily activity (things like negative/positive freedom, the golden mean, stephen covey's four quadrants). and those make all the effort worth it, even IF the process of reading wasn't beneficial in and of itself. (although I do think it is. for reasons we will discuss soon.)
@@soycrates totally feel what you mean about forgetting what we read. to your last point about subconscious being - I read somewhere (although I forget where!) that "the books you read are like the meals you eat. even if you can't remember what you ate specifically, they determine who you end up as". the books you've read, even when you forget them, shaped the decisions you made and the thoughts you had at that time in your life, which in turn shaped who you are now.
(And something that I've found helps with forgetting is just having all the most important books on my piano, where I see them daily. It's like the sub-bookshelf of Most Important Books.) Thanks for watching!
Who told you you are a “bad reader”?
@@timdemoss thank you so much for this comment
absolutely amazing quality, was halfway in before i realized this didn’t have millions of views
Thank you! I appreciate it. maybe someday it will :)
you’re gonna make it to the big leagues, keep on going with your unique and creative style and cultivating a loyal following, and you’ll make it! good luck out there ❤
😊 thank you!!! I appreciate the encouragement!
“Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete?” was my hardest book. I can’t imagine that more than 4 people on earth are smart enough to understand all of it. Yet…we slogged through all of it in a philosophy of science class and we learned so many things: humility, wonder, and a thousand physics terms. We grew tremendously. The professor knew the class really struggled with the book, and so he asked if he should use it again the next time he taught and, much to his surprise, we (the ones who read) said yes!
That...sounds very difficult. Glad you had someone to walk you through it! Who wrote that? Is it an old book?
Recently, I've been enjoying reading books in languages that I am still learning. I find it pleasantly humbling to work through a book that would be effortless if it were in my native language. I don't absorb as many new concepts as are described in this video, but I still learn a lot by challenging myself to assemble concepts based on a limited, non-fluent base of language knowledge. The effort reminds me of when I was learning to read as a kid, and every book was a challenge to comprehend - I think the endeavor makes me appreciate the very act of reading, which I would normally take for granted.
that sounds like a whole new level of difficulty but sounds really rewarding. Love the idea of bringing it back to when everything was a little hard to understand.
I'm currently in the process of reading a book on handling money called "The Richest Man in Babylon". It was originally published in the 1930s and the topics it explores are pretty dense so it's taking me a while to get through it. I have found that annotation is a useful way of understanding and retaining what you read. When I first started annotating, I kind of felt like I was vandalizing the book, but I'm getting more used to the idea. Books are made for you to enjoy and learn from; how can you do that if you can't understand what you're reading? Yay for George S. Clason!
~Teddie using Nat's account :)
great point. I don’t write in my books very often, but whenever I reread a book that I DID write in, I’m always glad because it helps me remember which parts I liked most and what past me thought of them.
Criminally underrated. Loved this take so much - thank you!
thank you! glad to have you here :)
Struggling through certain books is very important. You can hate 90% of a book, but experience a change in who you are by the end
sometimes the struggle helps cement the lesson in your mind. thanks for watching!
Think what's interesting is that AI telling versus own reading is kind of the point of Walden. Thoreau's saying that the important thing is that a person needs to think for themselves on what is a best life and not just blindly accept what is told them and taught them by society or the common norm. Same would go for AI. Someone or something else telling you what is is never going to be as useful and as accurate as what would be found by long and hard self contemplation and thought. Ultimately it's not about the reading but about the thinking. Knowledge is our only defense for what's happening now and what's coming.
Wild that I stumble across this series/video as I'm in the middle of my first read through of Walden. I'm glad to know I'm not the only one who finds he needs time to work through it 😂 I'm just past the first 100 pages, and it has definitely been a struggle to dissect and comprehend large passages at times due to the antiquity of the language and his tendency to ramble and go on tangents, but it feels very rewarding once (after two or three re-reads of a passage) I finally understand what Thoreau is saying. And it's even more rewarding when I can pick apart what I agree with and what I disagree with, rather than taking everything he says at face value. Good ole Henry can be a cynical bastard at times lol.
But the act of forcing myself to read material that doesn't come easy gives me a feeling that I don't think I've felt since middle school, which is the expansion my capacity to understand complex writing and thinking, and then to apply that complexity to my own writing and thinking. It's like the feeling when you were a kid where you picked up your first young adult novel after having only read chapter books - it makes you work harder for a more rewarding outcome, a more complex story, or a more complex philosophical expedition. Reading Walden inspires me to pick up more classics, more challenging reads, to practice deep understanding even more.
totally agree, Walden is definitely a wild read - philosophy and beans and accounting lists don’t usually all coincide, but here they do! Hope you enjoy the rest of it :)
I’m currently reading East of Eden and in chapter 13, Steinbeck profoundly laments the loss of the individual: “When our food and clothing and housing all are born in the complication of mass production, mass method is bound to get into our thinking and to eliminate all other thinking”
I loved your analogy about building our own mental houses -- it’s fruitful yet achievable, even amidst the busyness of our lives
I just finished East of Eden pretty recently! Loved it, hope you’re enjoying. And love your thoughts - fruitful yet achievable. Thanks for watching :)
insanely underrated channel
appreciate it!! gonna keep pushing forward - glad to know they’re coming through :)
Phenomenal video from a small youtuber
Thank you!!
such an amazing video!
i feel like with the rise of AI, intelligence and simply doing things has become so undervalued. there’s such a beauty in doing things yourself-i don’t know why it’s so lost now :,( it’s so saddening to see. i hope people can see the beauty in taking things slow and putting in the work once more
agreed! it's the same with all tools. I think our goal shouldn't be to dismiss the tool entirely, but just to make sure they're serving us, not taking over things we would actually enjoy doing.
here's a quote from Walden that I didn't include...but maybe should have: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven." Not entirely applicable to AI - but well phrased. thanks for watching!
@@timdemossthis book sounds amazing and so profound 💞 will def be reading soon!
It’s got some parts that take longer for sure but I did really enjoy it (broken up, over time) and I hope you do too!
Desiree by Annemarie Selinko. I pulled it out of a recycling bin and decided to keep it. It looked chonky and old and as far as I knew it was some obscure thing nobody else knew about. It was dense, too. It took me forever to work through it. Like, I often had to read one page and take a mini-break because otherwise my focus and attention span would fail, but I cried by the end of it. (Because emotions not frustration), and I love knowing just a little more about history.
isn’t one of the best parts of reading finding a book somewhere that wasn’t recommended to you, or suggested to you by an algorithm, and you have no clue at all if it’s going to be interesting? doesn’t feel like that happens often with other media. thanks for sharing!
Lately there have been a few books that I've really had to work through because I wasn't super duper interested in the content or the writing style, such as White Eskimo and Keeper of the Bees. Honestly, still haven't finished these yet BUT it's nice to try to read something that I normally wouldn't, and learn about things that I wouldn't ordinarily think about.
On the other hand, I have LOVED working through a few Jane Austen novels recently. They took me longer to read and I had to piece some of it together because of the language (I remember reading one page three times before I comprehended haha). The stories were all so rewarding and well worth all of the time, mental energy, and tea that it took me to finish them. And how cool to learn about history by teleportation via book!
:) I started Sense & Sensibility yesterday and I had to read one paragraph like three times - it's deceptive because the words are all words I know, but the sentences are long and the structure is really elegant. Maybe Pride and Prejudice was easier for me since I'd read abridged version as a kid?
Man I'm in love with your content
hey thanks! I’ll keep going!
You're not alone
"If you want to really understand something, write about it." Even if you read a book, asking ChatGPT to summarize deprives you of internalizing it when writing / reflecting afterward. I have been writing notes as I read (not just books - articles and videos too) and stick them in a doc named "Notes on X". Writing notes takes more time but lessons appear out of the woodwork that didn't when first encountering the material.
I’m not kidding when I say making these videos has helped cement a lot of the topics into my mind. far more than when I’d just been thinking about them in my brain
As an avid philosophy reader that has pushed through Nietzsche, Camus and a bunch of other "complicated" writers. My main advice is to listen to RUclips essays about whatever writer/philosophy branch you're interested on, most of them will paraphrase the book.
If you like and resonate with said phrase, go a step further and look up a YT video about that book or phrase, then try the book, if it's very hard and obnoxious, look up the main takeaways(preferably by humans since their inclinations help a lot in understanding philosophy), then, if you still like the book, continue reading it, by this time you'll have digested so many of the ideas behind it that you'll have a much easier time both enjoying and understanding it.
Think of books as of a person, you can't really get to know anyone by just hearing about them, but you do need to be picky about which persons you dedicate time to get to know.
Please quit the annoying background music.
Ever since chatgbt came out it’s given me 1984, we’re all going to be using newspeak, vibes if all of our youth who are in school take the two hits of a) going down the route of using AI to essentially formulate their thoughts for them to serve the purpose of b) not being able to sit down, focus and read in the first place. All of this was so wonderfully put-thank you for the video.
thank you so much! :)
I've recently read Moby Dick and I kept going back to whether it's worth it because it can be quite a pain but then it's so enjoyable at other times that it kept me going. I'm really glad I held out, it's a book about a long voyage at sea, it has to be long and a bit boring for you to understand how it feels, reading a summary would never have this effect.
It also applies to other things, few months ago I decided to learn to knit by making a scarf, I picked a yarn based on the colour I liked and kind of missed how thin it is and how long it would take, I'm barely 1/4 through. As a crocheter it got me thinking whether it's worth it because knitting can be made by a machine (as opposed to crochet which is always handmade) so what is a point of spending hours upon hours when a machine could do it. But I want to makey own scarf even if it takes a year, in the end it makes me appreciate the work put into making things and puts me off buying fast fashion even more.
love this. I just got around to reading Moby Dick this year...totally relate to the "is it worth it" question! and yes process is just part of our experience as people...why handmake mugs or knit scarves or cook when you could just go buy that at the store? - because it's enjoyable. thanks for watching!
This is brilliant. When I enjoy a novel, I read very fast. When I’m desperate to find the answers, I have looked at wiki or supersummary for chapter summaries so I can get to the end quicker. I have this urgency sometimes with books. It takes effort for me to slow down.
When I read the whole book, I remember much more about it. Because I have to live life between the pages - I can have discussions with my partner or friends/colleagues about what I’m reading. This helps me process what my thoughts and opinions are about the topics brought up within the book. I can draw parallels between other books, films, music and art. When I read summaries and explanations, I don’t remember as much information or plot. I’m not moved by the messages and learnings. I could write an A+ essay using study guides or ChatGPT, but I wouldn’t be able to have a compelling conversation over a glass of wine at a party. And that’s my life now as an adult, I want interesting conversations. I have no need for essay writing skills.
It’s almost like a book is already a summary or distillation of the author’s mind. a book summary is a summary of a summary. It can give the facts but you miss a lot. And you’re right - there’s no test.
I've been getting super into reading this past year. I've always struggled with it, but sometime last summer something just clicked in my brain, and suddenly I could read and enjoy reading, and I've been reading almost non-stop since. Part of it was allowing myself to read fiction. For a long while I sort of told myself that I had to read serious non-fiction books, that fantasy was trite and a waste of time, and it took me a while to realize that was super dumb, and that I love fantasy and horror and the surreal and all sorts of fiction.
I just read through the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson, these 4 huge 1200+ page books, and I flew through those. But now I'm reading a book called The Rainbow Abyss by Barbara Hambly, a trim ~300 pages, and I am absolutely smitten with prose and the story and the characters so far, but for some reason it is just an absolute slog to read. It's so slow going. I can barely scrape through a chapter a night for some reason. When normally a 300 page book I could probably get through in a weekend, or a week if I'm going a bit slow. I dunno what it is, but it's annoying cause I am really enjoying everything about book!
so glad you’re giving yourself permission to read fiction!! I was put on to the Stormlight Archive and Brandon Sanderson last year by some friends and have been working my way through them. I began with the Mistborn books (enjoyed!) which I thought were long enough…. Now that I’m on the SA I see how wrong I was :) On Oathbringer now and loving it. Thanks for your thoughts!
A book i really had to work through was neuromancer. I originally put down neuromancer because the writing style was so difficult to process, but i returned to it a couple months later. I kept seeing it mentioned in the best science fiction books of all time lists, and was like damn…I feel like i’m missing out. I picked it back up and read it with the help of reading chapter summaries after reading the actual chapters just to make sure i had all of the characters, definitions, and settings correct. After finishing it, it kind of blew my mind how many science fiction movies and games pulled inspiration from it. Cyberpunk 2077, and blade runner of course being the most prominent. I think about the book pretty often, and even though it was hell to read at times, I still definitely appreciate the time I took to do so.
Also further adding to this for anyone who’s interested, reading super tough books makes future ones A LOT easier to break down and get immersed into. After reading Neuromancer and taking to process to understand everything i was reading; I read the house of leaves soon after and had no trouble at all with its insane world building and complex storyline. I’m now reading dune and can say the exact same thing. If I didn’t read Neuromancer, these books probably would’ve really pissed me off to be honest lmfao. But researching the terms and stories within the book you’re reading immerses you into the story more than any other form of media. The book kind of takes up your whole mind therefore really making you feel like you’re living within the story itself. it’s insane
yeah as soon as you start reading something it just keeps popping up all over the place…everywhere! like the world knows you’re reading this book now. thanks for watching!
Love this series. Where do you find such chill music? Is it royalty free?
I've subscribed. Great work. :)
I actually record the music myself so I can make sure it matches the vibe :) thank you for watching & welcome to the channel!
youve some great videos
thanks!
Why think when government can think for you. 👀👀
Great insights on " Why read..."
Yes, I agree , A tool is useful in many ways but we have to do the thinking .
The thinking is in us and not in the tool.
Chat GPT and all other AI are great tools ( Tools that help us with knowledge) . But they are not a substitute or replacement for our own insights, Reflections and thoughts .
Information is transformed into knowledge only when it is churned and digested by our mind. Same goes for art. AI can mimic art but not create it as a real artist does , from the depths of their heart .
thanks for you thoughts! yeah agree - I enjoy thinking and creating, and I’d feel silly robbing myself of that joy. but still a useful tool in its way, and I’m sure we’ll see even more of it every year. Hopefully we navigate it well :)
LETS GOO NUMBER FOUR!! I AM WITH YOU MAN, KEEP GOING
Hey thanks! Appreciate the encouragement :)
Sophie's World by Jostein Gaarder. That's the first book that made me think of stuff bigger than "what to wear tomorrow to school". It was the start of my mindpalace.
I've read it 9 times. Love it.
just looked it up and seems really really interesting. nine times! must be a good one
Great post brother.
😊 thank you
Great content! Thank you so much for it! I’d suggest dialing the music down a bit, as just listening to the content without the captions is a bit difficult
Hey thank you for the recommendation! Was toying with the balance and thought I’d nailed it but will pull it back :) appreciate you!
that essay annecdote is quite pertinent, considering that essay literally means 'to say' and was invented as a genre of writing by Montaigne to express his thoughts on everything, from Cicero, On Sadness, On the resemblance of father's to children, of experience etc. His Essays, the first of their kind, was essentially the first blog. An unabashedly unfettered man expressing himself. When you read his essays, it really feels like having a conversation with the man. I'd recommend Donald Frame's translation, all others bring too much of the translator's personality in it.
Also, here's something my friend once wrote on Thoreau, Emerson and theTranscendentalists.
"Thoreau wanted to be Francis of Assisi but with American individualism and Transcendental authenticity substituted for Medieval piety and Christian humility. A proud and distant soul. He unfortunately promoted an economic ideal of self-sufficiency which even in his time approached total obsolescence, and the two World Wars along with the Cold War make it impossible for most people to really buy into the Transcendentalist notion that God is in each of us, and we recognize Him more as we become more like Him. Even in his time, I suspect, his unwillingness to play along with fledgling modernity doomed him to be an oddity.
I think he was a man born either four hundred years too early or four hundred years too late.
Emerson and Thoreau, I think, offered a version of existentialism that truly wished to transcend the false trappings of society, that found its sup and succor in being Godly, cultivating authenticity and virtue. Emerson and Thoreau had this idea that there is something of God inside of us, and insofar as we heed the call of it, rejecting all influences that would corrupt and mislead us, this Godliness would grow, and we'd become more capable of perceiving divinity.
You can see the similarity to atheistic existentialism, like Sartre, Camus, even Heidegger to a degree. A profound emphasis on seeing how fatuous the narratives that drive the world are, how little they actually help us understand our own private experience, our own quirks and idiosyncrasies. Even Kierkegaard notes that it is so easy to lose oneself.
Emerson and Thoreau were always going to have problems entering the philsophical mainstream. Part of it is that they're American and not European (the same thing happens to William James, who is perhaps the most staggeringly brilliant and beautiful mind of the 20th Century).
But I think more galling to mainstream philosophy is the importance of the Transcendentalist doctrine of Providence. This is a Calvinist notion, the idea that God really does guide everything in our lives, that His hand is ever-present in everything. For Emerson and Thoreau, this was not an empty piety. They truly believed that they who saw the world correctly, as profuse with the divine, could see beauty in corpses and tragedies, psychedelically inferring glory in all things.
As most philosophers, and most people, are incredulous towards the notion of Providence, transcendentalist thought just doesn't work. Thoreau just looks like a babbling schizo if you can't really believe there's a God who made you exactly who you are, and that like a flower, you're meant to blossom by listening to the impulses of your blood. Nope, go to Camus or Sartre or their adherents, say you need to be authentic because otherwise you're inauthentic and that's the path towards fascism."
Walden changed my life, especially his section on reading. Why wouldn’t I want to engage with the greatest minds in history? Every man would jump at silver coins but there are blocks of gold (classic books) sitting next to us everywhere.
what a great illustration! and yes... "this isn't actually something I want AI to do for me...this is something I enjoy". let the AI vacuum my house so I can go read books
I just realised that this is what I've always hated. I just graduated high school, so I'm intimately familiar with the idea of using ChatGPT for school assignments- at least, I'm familiar with others doing it. For reasons that I could never pinpoint, I just really hated using AI to write an essay.
But now, I realised that I was looking for that process. I wanted to think for myself, I wanted to put in the work, and I wanted to be the one to express *my* thoughts. I didn't even realise that that was what I was doing, but I was.
In the past few months, I've been doing quite a bit of self-reflection, and the topic of working (and especially of mental stimulation) has been really important in that reflection. And yet I didn't realise that I was the only one not using AI in my classes, all because I wanted to do the work. I never enjoyed the way things are taught in school, but subconsciously, I still motivated myself to learn and to work.
agree, learning can be pleasant! it can also be a drag for some people depending on how it’s presented, so I get the sentiment behind wanting to use AI. but also, I don’t. :)
Hi, Tim. This is just the second video of yours I have watched (coming here from the first reason to read), but I am already greatly enjoying your content and have subscribed. I stumbled across that first video while in a self-improvement video rabbit hole, but you've been able to reach me more effectively than any of the other creators I'd previously been listening to (not to pigeonhole your content into the "self-improvement" genre). I've been trying to incorporate regular reading into my life for years, so naturally this series of yours has spoken to me on a more personal level. Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this topic about which you clearly care so deeply. Knowing that you are a teacher, I appreciate hearing your perspective on this that much more.
I don't have an answer to your prompt at the end of the video, but your musings on ChatGPT and expression of our own thoughts struck me. I've never been much of a doomer when it comes to AI, but in thinking about the ways in which people have used it to outsource things as critical to our being and individualism as creativity, learning, and, in general, that *process* you allude to so often here in this video, I can't help but wonder where we're going as a society, and what we're teaching future generations, what values we're instilling in them. Students of all ages want to turn to AI to write their essays, I've heard several of my friends talk about how they use AI to write their emails or do their jobs for them (eye-roll)... what's next? And, piggybacking off of you, what are we clearing all of this headspace up for? Add to that the seemingly rampant oblivion-seeking and avoidance coping that takes the form of social media addiction and various other vices, less nuanced discourse surrounding important topics, etc., and I find myself slightly concerned about what the contents of peoples' mental fridges will be like in just a few years.
Anyway, I'm rambling. There's no coherent or profound underlying point here to tie all of these anxious threads together.
Most importantly, I just wanted to say thank you. I'm crawling out of a mental hole I've dug for myself through months of my own oblivion-seeking and deferring my attention outwards. I have long felt that reading is one tool that will help me turn things around, but haven't been able to understand why fully. Thank you for elucidating some of those reasons I haven't quite been able to articulate.
Thank you so much for this! I’m glad it’s being helpful for you :) Reading really is one super helpful tool and it’s been helpful in my life for a long time. so glad to have you around, thanks for the encouragement :) good luck on your journey of reclaiming your attention and embracing life - you got it!!
I'm late to the party, but damn, this is really good. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and putting this out!!
I'm so glad you enjoyed it! this is one of my favorite videos in the series. come as late to the party as you like :) thanks for the encouragement!
Couldn’t agree with this more. I’ve found I get different things from different styles of literature. What I gain from fiction is nothing like what I gain from nonfiction, and vice versa.
I’m never quite sure what I’m going to learn when I’m picking up a book, and I’m always pleasantly surprised. Even in nonfiction when I think I know what its supposed to teach me, I always learn something new. Thanks for watching!
I really love your videos! Thank you for posting this :)
Thank you so much! :) I appreciate it!
Infinite jest was a real slog but an absolute worthwhile experience.
I keep seeing it at stores and keep not getting it… I’m so curious though. Thanks for watching!
5:00 I understand this is beside the point, but sitting around and not thinking sounds really nice sometimes
honestly… yeah :) it does. there’s a topic for another video for sure
"Why chew when you can just blend your food?"
honestly, so much work...maybe I can pay someone to chew it for me!
I became an avid reader in August of '22-I was 38. I've read a hundred books since then and feel like I've only scratched the surface. These videos are resonating with me so much. Thank you for taking the time to put them together. 🙏
thanks so much for watching! I dropped by your site & saw your reads from this year - some of those are some of my very favorites! (Endurance by Alfred Lansing is a top tier book and I think about it all the time).
@@timdemoss it’s such an amazing book! I felt like I was right there with the crew the whole time. I recently picked up The Wager to continue my nautical itch lol
This is nice video. Got a mind boggling concept thrown at me
Thanks! it’s really been helpful for me to articulate what I’m thinking instead of letting it swirl in my brain. glad to have you around
great vid
thank you!
great quality video for the view and sub count, subscribed