SLOW Reading An Antidote to Burnout

For the first time in the 300,000 years of our species, we're becoming unaccustomed to sitting with our feelings and thinking slowly. We live in world that asks us to think fast, scroll fast, and react fast. And it's new problem we've never faced before. think have solution. It works for me. It lowers my blood pressure. It slows my thinking. And it enliven my rational mind. First, here is comedian Dez Bishop, who think describes the problem perfectly. think it's great that teenagers are talking about mindfulness and meditation, but it does entertain me because nobody when was teenager mentioned the word mindfulness. And do you know why that was? Because we were mindful half of every day because we didn't have choice. You're on the bus watching condensation drip. Mindfulness. didn't realize was like guru before got cell phone. You want to return VHS, you have to rewind it first. Mindfulness. Have you ever wound anything in your life? You are the postre generation. And I'm not judging you. I'm just saying that there were times when we were forced to be with ourselves. No wonder there's mental health crisis in young people. They've never actually had second to be with their feelings. every now and then when they get 10-second window into their soul, they feel something and they're like, what the beep is that?" Okay, so what is the solution? Well, think one way of slowing down our minds, regulating our emotions, and triggering new ways of problem solving is to read certain type of fiction in certain type of way. want to explore how reading consequential literature can restore something that social media has eroded. Our capacity for depth, meaning and above all, for slowness. In his groundbreaking book, The Burnout Society, philosopher Bjung Chulhan describes ours as culture of neuronal capitalism, where humans are no longer constrained by external discipline, but by internal compulsion. Most of us no longer have ruler who cracks the whip, but instead we push ourselves to keep up, to scroll more, to consume more, and to respond faster. until the very idea of rest and slowness seems foreign. Han believes that our world has become dominated by type of positivity. And by that he means the demand for constant activity, constant production, and constant improvement. And yet this positivity creates the perfect conditions for burnout. We don't crash, Han says, because we're oppressed from the outside, but we crash because we can't stop stimulating ourselves from inside. And social media is the perfect mechanism for this. It rewards immediacy, impulsivity, and emotional extremity. It trains the mind to crave speed, novelty, and surface level clarity. Everything is either dazzling or enraging. Nothing is subtle. was really struck by Reddit post that someone made on this subject. They wrote, "Literary fiction is the antidote to social media. Fiction slows us down and pulls us into the mundane, the subtle, the overlooked moments of life. And in doing so, it reveals their hidden brilliance. Literary fiction works on the nervous system like long, deep exhale. It demands certain type of attention that social media has almost trained out of us. Instead of feeding us emotional spikes, literary fiction asks us to linger in character's hesitation, in the long description of room, in the internal monologue of someone we will never meet, or in the details of moment that would barely register in everyday life, where social media shrinks our attention. literary fiction expands it and this is the kind of attention and slow thinking that Han intimates that we need. He says that only in state of calm can truth reveal itself because when you read novel you are forced to adopt the pace of the narrative. If character takes five pages describing making breakfast then you will enter the temporality of that breakfast. An author spends paragraph describing the way that sunlight hits windowsill, your mind must slow down enough to notice it. Reading literature is an invitation to step out of the accelerated time of digital life and enter what Bjongchu Khan calls contemplative time. And no contemporary author exemplifies this better than Carl Ovegard. His six volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle, turns the ordinary into something luminous. Housecard can spend pages describing buying groceries or preparing cup of coffee or doing the laundry. To an impatient reader, this may seem indulgent, even boring. But boredom in Klausgard's universe is not floor. It's doorway. Because when you slow down enough to follow him through these everyday rituals, something remarkable happens. The world becomes vivid again. You start to notice the sensory richness of what you usually overlook, the crack of crisp winter apple, the muted echo of footsteps in supermarket aisle, the fragile beauty of late afternoon shadow. House guard uses all of these to return wonder and awe to the banal. And this is exactly what social media takes from us. mean, we all know it's it's hard to enjoy long walk or slow morning or subtle pleasure of preparing meal when your mind is expecting those dopamine fireworks every 10 seconds. House guard and authors like him retrain the mind to experience life at the speed that it actually unfolds. One of the most famous passages of Klauskard finding transcendence in the mundane happens when after tense birthday party that he throws for his daughter. He describes standing alone in the kitchen late at night washing the dishes. The room is mess. The light is harsh. He's exhausted and feeling resentful. And yet, as he washes plate after plate, something shifts. He notices the simple beauty of the steam rising from the hot water. The rhythmic motion of scrubbing becomes soothing. Time seems to stretch and for moment this ordinary activity turns into something sacred. The temporary suspension of anxiety and self- judgment. The chaos gives way to clarity. He finds himself utterly present, anchored by the sensory reality of warm water. porcelain and repetition. There's moment when Klaus guard watches someone eat an apple. simple everyday action, but he perceives it in stunning detail. He focuses on the crisp sound as the skin breaks, the spray of juice and the cold whiteness of the flesh inside. He notices the almost violent contrast between the apple's smooth exterior and the act of biting into it. The scene lasts only few seconds in time, but on the page it expands into meditation on perception itself. How much of reality going on around us we constantly overlook and how thrilling everyday sensations can be when attended with full awareness. If you really want to dive into Klauscard and experience this kind of expansion of time and subtle perception of reality, there's nothing better than his passages on making coffee. The entire process is slow and deliberate. He notices how the light from the stove falls across the counter. He counts the beans. He fills the kettle. He listens to the low hum as the water heats up. Nothing is happening in narrative terms, but the stillness, the ritual of it, the sensory immersion become kind of refuge. For moment, he feels both insignificant and yet utterly alive. In Clausgard's hands, dishwashing and making coffee become meditative acts. And by reading it, we experience the same slowing down, the nervous system calming, the sense of presence deepening. In this way, literature retaches us how to inhabit moment fully. Another brilliant example comes from James Joyce's short story, The Dead from the Dubliners. We read of Gabriel, who attends dinner party with his wife and friends. He spends the entire time seemingly in his head, anxious about the speech he gives, anxious about the social faux pars that he makes and the high hopes that he has for romantic evening with his wife in the hotel room afterwards. But instead, some music played at the party causes his wife to reminisce about her first love and the music they listened to and sang together. He died in his youth and she becomes melancholy and overcome with grief and ends up spending the night crying. In the final scene, Gabriel looks out of the window and notices how snow is gently falling across Ireland. While observing the snow, he has kind of an awakening, momento mory. He thinks of this young man, Michael, who died and is lying in the grave now shrouded in snow. and it seems to serve to remind him that life is short and fleeting. few light taps on the pain made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yet the newspapers were right. The snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain on the treeless hills, falling softly on the bog of Allen and further westward softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling too on every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furry lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling like the descent of their last end upon all the living and the dead. There's reason why TS Elliot called this the best short story ever written. There's no twist. There's no conflict. There's no spectacle. There's just an awareness of snow. And in writing the way he does, Joyce seems to slow time almost to halt. And he invites us into this universal moment of quiet. moment where the boundaries between life and death, joy and sorrow, past and present, soften into single drifting snowfall. passage is profound not because of its plot but because of its stillness. For few lines we inhabit world where nothing is demanded of us. We simply observe, we breathe, we feel the vastness of existence without any pressure to react to it. This is literary attention at its finest. think we need this capacity for contemplation, for noticing the apparently mundane and benal, to restore us to type of slow thinking that enables us to appreciate the vividness of reality. As Bjung Chilhan might say, the world becomes comprehensible again, not as chaos of stimuli, but as space where truth can quietly prevail. Let me know in the comments which passages or poems have helped you to appreciate the quality of slow reading and slow thinking. I'll see you in the comments and I'll see you next week for another episode. Thanks for watching.