Have you noticed this?
Smartphones and the internet aren't anything new anymore. They're infrastructure. Everyone carries a screen in their pocket, loaded with news feeds, messaging apps, TikTok, Reddit, podcasts, and now a whole new wave of AI agent apps.
Every spare minute gets filled. Even at work, let's be honest, plenty of us sneak in a quick scroll when no one's looking.
A while back, I went to a public library. I was between jobs, had some time before starting at a new company, and thought I'd hang out at the library and do some reading.
Row after row of desks, and on every single one: a laptop, a phone, or a tablet propped up. Everyone was busy. Busy staring at their own screen.
The funniest part? A lot of people did grab stacks of books from the shelves. But they weren't reading them. The books were piled up as stands, makeshift risers for laptops, phone holders, tablet props. Books in a library had found a brand new purpose: monitor stands.
Most of the people actually flipping through pages were older folks.
The ironic part? I was no better. I walked in with my own laptop, set it on the desk, and stared at it all day. So much for "going to the library to read." All I really did was find an air-conditioned spot to keep staring at my screen.
For a moment, I sort of zoned out. The library was the same library. But the people sitting in it, myself included, weren't really there for books anymore.
Look, I'm not saying devices are bad. I'm a QA engineer. My entire job is poking at systems and screens. I probably spend more hours staring at a monitor than most people. Short videos are fun. AI tools genuinely make work faster. I get it.
But I've noticed something about myself: I haven't had the patience to finish a paper book in a long time.
It's not a time problem. It's a patience problem. I open a book, read a few pages, and I start wondering whether I've got a new notification. Ten minutes in, my hand reaches for my phone on its own. Being completely lost in a book for an hour straight? That feels like something from a past life.
I don't think I'm the only one.
So I want to ask you: do you still have the time, or more honestly, the patience, to sit down and read a book?
Maybe we should try. Pull that dusty book off the shelf. Turn off the phone. Make a cup of tea or coffee. Read for thirty minutes. Just thirty.
Thirty minutes of not staring at a backlit screen. That's it.
I'll go first. Here are a few books on my list:
- Thirty-Six Stratagems — Ancient Chinese military wisdom. Short, sharp, and every stratagem makes you think.
- Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shan Hai Jing) — An ancient Chinese bestiary. Reads like a fantasy world-building doc written thousands of years ago.
- Tao Te Ching — Laozi's 5,000 characters. The more you read it, the more you feel it says everything and nothing at the same time.
- Bhagavad Gita — A philosophical classic from India. A dialogue about duty, action, and the self. Hits different when you read it across cultures.
- Selected Works of Mao Zedong — Whatever your politics, the strategic thinking and the writing itself are worth studying.
Most of these are available in multiple languages: English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, and more. No matter where you are, you can probably find a copy.
Now it's your turn. If you've got a book worth reading, drop it in the comments. Bonus points if it has multilingual editions so people across this community can pick it up.
Can't wait to see what you've been reading.
P.S. English isn't my first language. I use AI to polish the writing and smooth out the rough edges. Thanks for reading. ☕ Buy me a coffee
P.S.S. The old series paperback is now available. Buy it here: Amazon - AI, Ego & Regret
Top comments (91)
I'd point the finger past the phone, at something bigger: an economy that's learned to monetise every idle second. Once your attention became someone's inventory, boredom — the soil that reading actually needs — got quietly paved over. A book asks for slow, unproductive, unmonetisable time, and that's exactly the kind of time the system is built to eliminate. The patience didn't disappear; it got sold. Right now I'm reading a paperback — A Concise History of Sunnis and Shi'is by John McHugo — and honestly, choosing that slowness feels like a small act of resistance.
This is such a powerful observation. What a gentle yet forceful comment, absolutely brilliant! Attention economy really erodes that quiet, empty boredom that makes deep reading possible.👏 Our patience hasn’t vanished; it’s constantly being auctioned off for tiny rewards. Choosing slow, unmonetizable reading time really is a gentle, meaningful form of resistance. Thanks for sharing your book pick too, it sounds fascinating.👍️
Thank you — and honestly you sharpened it: the auction never stops, and each bid is so small we don't notice we've handed over the afternoon. The resistance needn't be grand — thirty quiet minutes is enough, precisely because it produces nothing anyone can sell.
Exactly. Those tiny, almost invisible bids add up quietly and eat away large chunks of our time before we realize it. Small, quiet moments of unproductive reading are enough to hold onto a little piece of ourselves. Thirty minutes can make such a big difference 📖
those thirty minutes matter because they're unproductive, a small piece of yourself you refuse to put up for auction. 📖
I can actually spare those thirty minutes and I love reading. The real fight: my tired brain instinctively wants to scroll, even when I want to read. Do you know that inner conflict?
Oh, I know it intimately — and I think that inner conflict is the most honest description of the whole thing. It's not about time or love of reading; it's that a tired brain reaches for the thing that asks nothing of it. Scrolling is downhill; reading is a small uphill, and a depleted mind always wants downhill.
What helps me: don't fight it head-on, just lower the bar absurdly. Not "read thirty minutes" — "read one page." The tired part agrees because it sounds like nothing, and often you look up twenty minutes later. Noticing the pull, like you just did, is already most of the battle.
That low‑bar method works in theory. As a QA, endless edge‑case searching primes my brain for rapid stimuli. The work‑mindset persists after hours and makes slow‑paced reading hard, even when I want to read. Job‑related mental habits spill over into personal rest time.😂
Ha — that's a sharp bit of self-QA: you found the edge case in the low-bar method. It assumes a brain at rest; yours doesn't clock out. 😂 Maybe don't fight the wired-for-stimuli brain — feed it books with built-in edge cases (dense nonfiction, puzzle-heavy mysteries) where your problem-solving instinct becomes an asset, then ease toward slower stuff. Meet the brain where it is — same way you'd handle a flaky test. 😄
That’s an interesting analogy with flaky tests. It really hits home — you cannot force a system to behave against its existing runtime state. Working with what the brain already does, rather than fighting against it, feels like a much more realistic approach.👏
Debugging the reader instead of blaming him — that's the QA instinct finally working for you. 👏
Fifty-odd comments in and I don't think anyone has mentioned audiobooks, which is what I've been doing for years. Gym, commute, washing up. I've finished plenty of books that way.
But I've started to think they solve the wrong problem.
This post isn't really about finishing books. It's about patience. An audiobook lets you finish the book while doing something else entirely, so you get the content and skip the practice. I've ended up with the reading list and none of the muscle.
@james_anderson_h's point is the uncomfortable one here. If boredom is what got paved over, an audiobook on a commute is paving it too. It's just doing it with something respectable, which makes it much harder to notice.
The other thing I've noticed since going back to paper: you can't really reread a sentence in an audiobook. Rewinding fifteen seconds breaks the flow, so you let the half-understood sentence go past. On paper, your eye goes back on its own, and you barely register that it happened. Audiobooks quietly train you to accept not-quite-getting-it.
So I'm back on a paperback, a few minutes at the weekend. Not thirty. A few. Which is basically James's one-page trick, and it's the only version that's survived contact with a working week.
Currently reading AI, ego and regrets. Halfway through.
you caught the thing audiobooks hide so well: they let you finish the book and skip the practice. The content was never the point — the patience was — and an audiobook on a commute is paving over the same boredom, just wearing a respectable coat, which is exactly why it's harder to notice you're doing it. You end up with the reading list and none of the muscle. That's a genuinely uncomfortable observation about myself too.
And the reread point I hadn't thought of at all — on paper your eye slips back to a half-understood sentence before you even register it, but rewinding an audiobook breaks the flow so you let the fog slide past. Over years, that quietly trains you to accept not-quite-getting-it, which might be the more corrosive habit than not reading at all.
"A few minutes, not thirty — the only version that survived contact with a working week" is the realest endorsement the one-page idea could get, because a method that doesn't survive a Tuesday isn't a method, it's a wish. You didn't adopt the trick, you stress-tested it down to what actually holds. That's the whole thing.
You nailed it, and I like the statement you made: "A method that doesn't survive a Tuesday isn't a method, it's a wish." Definitely noting that down, and I am sure it applies well beyond reading.
Thank you, James.. 👊
😄
AI, Ego and Regrets?
I’ve never heard of this book at all. Just judging by the title, I suspected the author was a huge fan of Love, Death & Robots. How else would they come up with such a weird name?😂 Wait a minute, it’s sold on Amazon. Strange, the author shares the exact same name as me! Wow, what an amazing coincidence. I want his autograph,hahaha🤣
Hahaha, what a coincidence indeed. Same name, same man who spent a week fighting Amazon's review system over it. 😂
And I'd happily take that autograph. I bought the paperback precisely so there'd be something to sign one day.
It's also the only reason the audiobook argument I made above doesn't apply to me this time. I couldn't listen to yours even if I wanted to. No audio edition, so paper it had to be, and halfway in I'm glad of it. The 450ms note landed differently on the page than it did on a screen.
So you can take credit for getting at least one person back onto paper. Mission accomplished before you even asked. 📖👊
That reminds me. I plan to expand this IP series later. An audiobook, games and more are definitely on the table. But reading out those distinctive code snippets from the stories would be absolutely brutal, hahaha 😂
Right now I’m reading Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, mostly on public transport. And I’ve also been reading The Silmarillion for about two years and still haven’t finished it. But I think I deserve some credit just for trying, right? 😂
BTW, going to the library, finding an air-conditioned spot, and then staring at your laptop all day is an interesting approach. 😂 Admit it, you were there for the air conditioning, not the books.🤣🤣
Haha, reading books during your commute definitely deserves some credit.👍️ Honestly, this morning on the subway I saw someone reading a physical book. I even stared a little longer, trying to figure out what book he was holding. Unfortunately I’m nearsighted and couldn’t make it out. Then I looked around — everyone, including me, was glued to their phones.😅
To be honest, I had just gotten laid‑off from my previous job back then. I was worried my family would stress out over me being unemployed, so I didn’t tell them. The library became my pretend workplace. Free seats, air‑conditioning and Wi‑Fi, it was absolutely amazing, haha.🤣
PS: Quite a lot of people in the library are in the same boat, showing up as if they are going to work. Hope all of them land their ideal jobs.🙏
I have to say, in the Prague subway for example, there are still quite a lot of people reading books. Of course, the rest are staring at their phones, but still. 😅
Ah, now I get it. That makes much more sense.
Haha, let me ask a cheeky question — could one reason people read books on the subway be bad mobile network signal?🤣 Interesting! It’s nice to see quite a few book readers on Prague’s subway. Everywhere you go, phones dominate most people’s attention these days. Glad my story about the library‑as‑fake‑office makes sense to you 😂
Actually, Prague has pretty good signal in the subway. So there must be another reason.😆
Yep, that’s sadly true. I’m trying to limit the time I spend staring at my phone, but it’s not always easy. And DEV definitely doesn’t help. 🤣🤣
Hahaha totally agree🤣. DEV is such an endless‑scroll trap that’s hard to step away from. It works against me, and my compulsion to clear all red notification dots makes it even worse, hahaha.😂
I read the Silmarillion in a long weekend LOL - so fascinating, just couldn't put it down until I finished it, I'm a total Tolkien freak - ask me anything about the Noldor and the Sindar, and the Dagor Bragollach and all that, or to sketch a pretty accurate map of Beleriand and Middle Earth from memory ;-)
Wow, I just looked it up. I’ve only read The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and haven’t touched The Silmarillion yet. Added it to my list — my to‑read pile just got longer, haha.😂
The Silmarillion is fascinating because it sheds light on many things which are touched upon or alluded to in LOTR and The Hobbit, but which are not fully explained there - reading the Silmarillion, you'll see how many of those threads and "loose ends" are actually connected, which is pretty satisfying - it sets the background and the 'foundation' for the whole Tolkien mythology ...
Then I have to recommend one of China's Four Great Classical Novels: Journey to the West.
Written during the Ming Dynasty over 400 years ago, it is one of the most famous fantasy epics in Chinese literature.
The story centers on a Buddhist monk, Tang Sanzang. He embarks on a grueling westward pilgrimage to India to retrieve sacred Buddhist scriptures. Along the journey, he meets three powerful disciples who swear to protect him: Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, who possesses immense magic strength and a rebellious spirit; Zhu Bajie, a half-human half-pig warrior full of weaknesses yet loyal; and Sha Wujing, the quiet, steady sand demon.
During their long trip, the group faces 81 deadly trials. They fight hundreds of monsters and demons. Some monsters are cruel outlaws, while others are disciples of gods who sneak down to the mortal world to create trouble.
Beneath the thrilling battles and magical adventures, this book carries deep ideas. It tells us that personal growth is full of hardships. Even heroes need to overcome their inner flaws, not just enemies outside.
Journey to the West has deeply influenced Chinese culture. Countless films, cartoons, video games and stage works are adapted from it. The Monkey King has become a world-famous cultural icon. If you love fantasy and mythological stories, this classic is well worth reading.
Oh nice! 😀 I’ve read the trilogy and The Hobbit multiple times, but The Silmarillion is another level. 😅 I’m somewhere in the middle and still can’t force myself to finish it.
Well, some chapters are really long and convoluted, e.g. Beren and Luthien, or the errands of Turin Turambar - maybe an idea to temporarily skip those in favor of the more fast-paced and action-packed chapters, and revisit them later ...
If comptia A+ counts... last year 😂 nearly 2000 pages, so that's like 4 books? 🤣🤣🤣
Haha, what about this year? Are there any stats available?🤣
Everything has been academic or digital. No fun paperbacks. I got the volume 1 and 2 CCNA books, but they are incredibly dry. I like the stuff I find online better for that. I bought a cisco switch only to find how proprietary the OSes are. Hit a wall there. I now have a useless 48 port switch. I got halfway through Network Chucks Summer of CCNA class and hit a wall with my other classes, family stuff, full time+ work and driving out of state every other weekend.
I found out after 9 months of employment I am getting terminated. That happened yesterday. That means I'll have time for books and projects soon. 😂
Wait a second... I lied. I also bought a Kevin Mitnick book at Barnes and noble with my significant other. I know I started reading it. 📚
Sorry about your job situation. Unexpected shifts sometimes create room for reading and personal projects. You lose some, you gain some — you’ll have to look for new work, yet you get precious quiet reading time, hahaha. I’ve been through layoff and a gap phase too before joining a new company. 😂Things will sort themselves out, keep your head up 💪. Proprietary network gear can be really frustrating, and the Mitnick book should be a nice change of pace.
Thank you ⭐ It's nice to have a community outlet like this to share experiences.
I like it!😢
😄Hahaha, the like fanatic has arrived 😂
Please please 🤣🤣🤣🤣
My phone 2% 🤣
I have only one like! ❤️😢
I just checked the homepage and got quite a shock — dozens of notification red dots, hahaha 🤣
How many likes have you got on DEV.to in total? 🤣
😱
Wow 🥰
And your contribution?🤣if u comfortable?
About a month ago. I finished 20 books from the same series, reading whenever I had free time, hahaha 😂
That’s actually pretty interesting and cool :D By the way, I really like your cute little panda 🐼… how about letting me take it home for a day? 😜 I promise I’ll take good care of it! Although, there’s a small chance I might not return it… 😢🐼❤️
Pandas! Almost every zoo in China has a few of them, hahaha 😂. I hope their population keeps growing. It would be really fun to have a panda as a pet.
Seeing pandas in almost every zoo in China must be pretty normal since they're their national animal🐼
Our national animal is tiger 🐯
But how am I supposed to keep either of them as a pet? My cat would be so jealous 😭
And honestly, My cat never lets me feel like I'm home alone....
She keeps me busy by destroying literally everything in the house 🏠
That might mean there are mice in your room. The two of you are putting on a real Tom and Jerry show 🤣
It’s not like that—there are no mice in my house. I’m very scared of mice. My cat only creates chaos around the house when someone in the neighborhood is cooking non-veg. But I lock her in a room, so she keeps jumping around.🤣
Crazy how it picks up the smell of non-veg food nearby! Cats have such amazing noses 🐱🤣
LoL 🤣 do you have a cat?
I don’t have a cat. My family hates cat fur, but I visit cat cafes on weekends to hang out with kitties 😺. I’ve noticed the cats aren’t scared of me at all. They’ll come over to rub against me or even lie down and sleep right on my lap 😂
Beautiful 😍❤️
🤣又来猫咖了
It’s (A)maz(I)ng ✨
I used to love books, and I’ve probably read more than 500 novels, but I eventually stopped reading paper books almost completely.
What I still like about paper is how little noise there is. There’s nothing competing for your attention, so once you get absorbed in the story, you can keep reading for hours.
Digital reading feels different. There are always notifications, light, tabs, or something else pulling at your attention. But at the same time, it’s so convenient that I still end up choosing digital anyway.
So I think you may be right about patience getting weaker. Especially since AI became part of my daily workflow, even working on just one screen sometimes feels strangely insufficient 😹
That split feeling is very relatable. Physical books offer pure immersion, yet digital formats win out purely on convenience. Working with AI also rewires how our brains expect stimulation, making single‑screen sessions feel surprisingly limiting. Still, I have to admit how handy digital reading devices really are, things like Kindle. It’s such a conflicting situation, hahaha.🤣
My favorite book 😄:
Charles Petzold Code The Hidden Language Of Computer Hardware And Software
Haha, no surprise, lots of tech books here.😂
I like science books, either "hard" science (proper math/physics), or 'popularized' science (difficult science, but explained in layman's terms) - have quite a few of these kind of books sitting on a shelf at home!
Last and best "paper" book I read? "The Inflationary Universe" by Alan H. Guth - brilliant book, it explains what happened during the first few nanoseconds (!) of the universe :-)
Slight problem though: last time I picked up a paper book and tried to read it, I noticed that the letters are so small! Really need to buy reading glasses now, LOL :-)
P.S. yeah and Tolkien, devoured all of them, not just LOTR, the Hobbit and The Silmarillion, but also the more obscure ones like the Lost Tales - must have read most of those at least 4 or 5 times ...
The Inflationary Universe sounds absolutely fascinating. I love this genre of books too and have added it to my to‑read list. Also, your mention of reading glasses made me laugh so hard.😂 Well, we can’t fight getting older. Hopefully medical technology will advance further and offer a permanent fix for all kinds of eye‑related issues. Though I feel glasses bring different kinds of charm to different people, maybe even making you look more mature, steady and wise, haha.🤣
My brother has reading glasses since a few years, and I told him "you look handsome, bro!" - so yeah, there's definitely something to that!
P.S. yeah do pick up "The Inflationary Universe" - it's brilliant, such a fascinating read ...
I just checked, surprisingly there is no official Chinese translation for The Inflationary Universe. Looks like I will have to tackle the original English edition.🤣
Yeah anyway better to read it in English I think, there's so much English based scientific jargon in there ...
Good point. Technical terms can get tricky during translation. I’ll take my time going through the original text. If I get stuck on some hard parts, I’ll let AI do real‑time translation and read it aloud for me, haha. Looking forward to it!🤣
I started reading books again since the beginning of this year as a part of my digital detox.
The books I recently read are two : Vegetable Roots Discourse(菜根譚) and Cosmos.
If you haven't read neither of them I highly recommend you read them😊
Great job picking reading back up and giving yourself more time to get immersed in books. Vegetable Roots Discourse is also on my reading list, while I haven’t read Cosmos yet. I’ll add it to my notes.👏
I think I have the opposite problem. 😂
I can still spend hours reading documentation, RFCs, source code, kernel internals, or a ridiculously long technical paper without noticing the time.
Give me a normal book, though, and after 20 pages my brain goes:
“Interesting… but I wonder what’s happening on the server.” 🤣
So maybe we haven’t lost our ability to focus. We’ve just trained our attention to expect interaction, problems to solve, and immediate feedback.
That said, there’s something a paper book can do that a screen rarely does: it gives your brain nowhere else to go.
No tabs. No notifications. No Cmd+Tab. No “I’ll just check one thing.”
Maybe that’s exactly why reading one feels harder now — and exactly why it’s still worth doing.
And yes, technical books absolutely count. Otherwise half of DEV Community is disqualified immediately. 😂
This whole comment made me laugh really hard, mate. It’s such an accurate description of the developer brain. We can lose ourselves for hours digging through documentation, RFCs, kernel source code and dense technical papers without feeling tired at all. But the moment we open an ordinary non‑technical book, our minds start wandering, and we begin wondering what is going on with the servers. In a funny way, your brain feels almost like an AI 🤣🤣🤣— it focuses sharply when there are concrete problems to solve and feedback to get, yet struggles with slow, passive reading without actionable tasks.
Your observation about physical books is brilliant. Screens are full of temptations: browser tabs, pop‑up notifications, quick keyboard shortcuts to jump away, and that little urge to “just check one quick thing”. A real paper book removes all those escape routes, forcing your brain to stay within the content. That is exactly why it has become so difficult for many of us nowadays.
And I fully agree technical books absolutely count. If they didn’t, most people here on DEV would be instantly disqualified 🤣
Haha, “your brain feels almost like an AI” got me. 🤣
Although if I were an AI, I’d probably be a badly configured self-hosted one:
“Would you like to read this novel?”
“No, but I found three race conditions, an outdated dependency, and something suspicious in the server logs.” 😂
Jokes aside, I think you nailed it with the word feedback.
Technical reading constantly rewards you: you understand something, test it, solve something, or immediately apply it. A novel asks for something completely different — patience without immediate output.
Maybe that’s a mental muscle worth training precisely because our work rarely exercises it anymore.
And now you’ve successfully made me feel like I should actually finish a non-technical book. Damn it. 😂📚
hahahaha🤣 Mission accomplished then! 👏Hope you pick a nice non‑technical book and enjoy that slow‑burn reading experience. Don’t let your inner self‑hosted AI keep dragging you back to server logs 😂📖
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