Comment by mike_hearn
20 days ago
Maybe it'd help to have a new perspective on it? I think you're completely right that you're just a much more efficient consumer now than you once were. But what's wrong with that?
I'm in the same boat as you, except that I don't feel I have attention span problems. If what I'm reading is a bad use of time, I switch to something else. If it's not, I have no trouble reading a long article or paper. I frequently read a blog post and discover half an hour later that I just read what would be 30-40 pages if printed out. It doesn't feel like a lot of reading because there's no physical page turning, but it is.
If you can consume an interesting story at 2x speed, there's no moral or personal wrong in wanting to consume it at 2x speed. Just do it! Books are mere technology: they can and should be replaced with something better if it comes along.
The key word here (and this is something I fight personally) is consuming. You don’t learn anything by consuming it; you only learn by doing it. So being able to watch the lecture at 2X is only helping if it makes more time to do the exercises.
But doing the exercises is hard (much like physical exercise, that pain is in fact the signal that you’re making progress). And the more time we spend just consuming, the less natural it feels to work.
It’s so easy to blast through a lecture or speed read a text and feel like you accomplished “learning”. That illusion is destroyed as soon as you have to actually do something (in school, that’s usually write an essay or pass a test).
In other words, the bottleneck has never been how fast you can consume the text. It’s how fast you can do the work to internalize the knowledge.