I've recently regained the ability to do in-depth reading. I attribute the final loss of my old since-childhood book habit to the Kindle app on my iPad... it se

I've recently regained the ability to do in-depth reading. I attribute the final loss of my old since-childhood book habit to the Kindle app on my iPad... it seemed "better" to buy electronic books instead. But that meant the Internet was there waiting for me, after every chapter or pause, I could just go check Facebook or email, or... yeah. So I started reading paper books again. The context switch into paper is relatively expensive, so I'd stay there, not cutting over to the internet. I started reading serious material again. From there, my spouse gave me her unused Kindle Paperwhite (she reads a ton on her iPad, so she doesn't use the Paperwhite), and I found the Paperwhite gave me most of the Kindle advantages without the multipurpose device disadvantages. Next, I cut back seriously on my social media. I went cold turkey on Facebook for a bit (and on Twitter shortly after), and I consciously avoid bad FB habits. Nonetheless, it's an addiction machine, and when I do use it again, I realize that cold turkey is probably better. Without social media apps on my phone, I find myself with a Kindle app instead. Much better! When I was 20 or so and reading very heavily (I had a job that gave me four hours of sitting time in half hour chunks, so I read a lot), I started a self-control process of reading one fiction and one non-fiction book simultaneously - at that time, to make sure I read plenty of non-fiction. Now, I have to make myself read fiction instead. I seem to have settled that divide by reading fiction on my phone, and non-fiction on my Kindle. Audiobooks and podcasts have been a change for me, too. I started with a serious audiobook on a road trip (The Order of Time, by Carlo Rovelli). From there, I blew through all 120 episodes of the Philosophize This! podcast. A new job has me on an ugly commute for the first time in years, so I'm filling that time in the car with Hardcore History (the monstrous six hour Celtic Holocaust episode about the Roman invasion of Gaul), and foreign language vocabulary study (Spanish). Having a proper reading habit of an hour or two a day on average has me back to reading heavy things. I've read a lot of history this year, and I'm currently back to reading philosophy (Simone de Beauvoir and Herbert Marcuse). Plus, I'm managing to dig through a backlog of software industry books, mostly DevOps things I'd missed out on before. It's so much better than social media.