When I was a youngster, I consumed books until my vision blurred. Once my exams came around, I demonstrated the endurance of a ascetic, studying for lengthy periods without a break. But in lately, I’ve observed that capacity for intense concentration dissolve into endless scrolling on my device. My attention span now shrinks like a slug at the tap of a thumb. Reading for enjoyment seems less like nourishment and more like endurance training. And for a person who writes for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that left me disheartened. I wanted to restore that mental elasticity, to halt the brain rot.
So, about a twelve months back, I made a modest promise: every time I came across a word I didn’t know – whether in a book, an piece, or an casual discussion – I would look it up and write it down. Nothing fancy, no elegant notebook or fountain pen. Just a ongoing record maintained, amusingly, on my phone. Each week, I’d devote a few moments reading the list back in an attempt to lodge the word into my recall.
The record now spans almost 20 pages, and this tiny ritual has been quietly transformative. The benefit is less about peacocking with uncommon descriptors – which, to be honest, can make you sound unbearable – and more about the cognitive exercise of the ritual. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a faint expansion, as though some neglected part of my mind is stirring again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in conversation, the very act of spotting, logging and revising it interrupts the slide into inactive, semi-skimmed attention.
Additionally, there's a diary-keeping aspect to it – it acts as something of a journal, a record of where I’ve been reading, what I’ve been thinking about and who I’ve been listening to.
Not that it’s an simple habit to maintain. It is often extremely impractical. If I’m reading on the subway, I have to stop in the middle, take out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to bump the stranger squeezed against me. It can reduce my pace to a maddening speed. (The Kindle, with its built-in lexicon, is much kinder). And then there’s the revising (which I often neglect to do), dutifully browsing through my expanding word-hoard like I’m preparing for a word test.
In practice, I incorporate perhaps 5% of these terms into my everyday conversation. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them remain like museum pieces – appreciated and catalogued but rarely handled.
Nevertheless, it’s made my mind much keener. I find myself turning less often for the same tired handful of descriptors, and more frequently for something exact and strong. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the exact term you were searching for – like locating the missing puzzle piece that locks the image into place.
At a time when our devices siphon off our attention with relentless efficiency, it feels rebellious to use my own as a tool for deliberate thinking. And it has given me back something I feared I’d forfeited – the pleasure of engaging a intellect that, after a long time of slack scrolling, is finally waking up again.
A seasoned journalist with a passion for uncovering stories that matter in the Czech Republic and beyond.
