My Reading Burden
Want some honesty about how I (mis)spend my time? These days, my daily routine includes reading all of the following:
- The comments on this blog (many of which I then answer)
- The Washington Post (“The Post Most” takes me about an hour a day, every day)
- The New York Times
- Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten
- Zvi Mowshowitz’s Don’t Worry About the Vase (Zvi is so superhumanly prolific that reading him easily takes 12 hours per week … but it’s all good stuff!)
- Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong (rarely updated anymore, thankfully for my reading time!)
- Quillette
- The Free Press
- Mosaic
- Tablet
- Commentary
- Paul Graham’s Twitter
- David Deutsch’s Twitter
- Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Twitter
- Updates and comments from my Facebook friends (this can easily take a couple hours per day)
- The quant-ph arXiv (I scan maybe 50 titles and abstracts per day, and if any papers are relevant to me, read at least their introductions)
- The science fiction and fantasy novels I read with my kids
- Whichever other books I’m currently reading
Many of these materials contain lists of links to other articles, or tweet threads, some of which then take me hours to read in themselves. This is not counting podcasts or movies or TV shows.
While I read unusually quickly, I’d estimate that my reading burden is now at eight hours per day, seven days per week. I haven’t finished reading by the time my kids are back from school or day camp. Now let’s add in my actual job (or two jobs, although the OpenAI one is ending this month, and I start teaching again in two weeks). Add in answering emails (including from fans and advice-seekers), giving lectures, meeting grad students and undergrads, doing Zoom calls, filling out forms, consulting, going on podcasts, reviewing papers, taking care of my kids, eating, shopping, personal hygiene.
As often as not, when the day is done, it’s not just that I’ve achieved nothing of lasting value—it’s that I’ve never even started with research, writing, or any long-term projects. This contrasts with my twenties, when obsessively working on research problems and writing up the results could easily fill my day.
The solution seems obvious: stop reading so much. Cut back to a few hours per day, tops. But it’s hard. The rapid scale-up of AI is a once-in-the-history-of-civilization story that I feel astounded to be living through and compelled to follow, and just keeping up with the highlights is almost a full-time job in itself. The threat to democracy from Trump, Putin, Xi, Maduro, and the world’s other authoritarians is another story that I feel unable to look away from.
Since October 7, though, the once-again-precarious situation of Jews everywhere on earth has become, on top of everything else it is, the #1 drain on my time. It would be one thing if I limited myself to thoughtful analyses, but I can easily lose hours per day doomscrolling through the infinite firehose of strident anti-Zionism (and often, simple unconcealed Jew-hatred) that one finds for example on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment sections of Washington Post articles. Every time someone calls the “Zios” land-stealing baby-killers who deserve to die, my brain insists that they’re addressing me personally. So I stop to ponder the psychology of each individual commenter before moving on to the next, struggle to see the world from their eyes. Would explaining the complex realities of the conflict change this person’s mind? What about introducing them to my friends and relatives in Israel who never knew any other home and want nothing but peace, coexistence, and a two-state solution?
I naturally can’t say that all this compulsive reading makes me happy or fulfilled. Worse yet, I can’t even say it makes me feel more informed. What I suppose it does make me feel is … excused. If so much is being written daily about the biggest controversies in the world, then how can I be blamed for reading it rather than doing anything new?
At the risk of adding even more to the terrifying torrent of words, I’d like to hear from anyone who ever struggled with a similar reading addiction, and successfully overcame it. What worked for you?