I read a book last year that started a process in my head that guided me to want to unplug from the internet. Central to that process was the idea that I wanted to consume less. Consume less of everything. Consume less physical things, and aphysical things. My life is becoming a process of consumption. In my endless pursuit of consumption I am becoming forgetful. Forgetful of things along the whole spectrum of memory. Forgetting to bring my lunch to work. Forgetting to love my spouse. Forgetting to seek Christ. I don’t like this. This is not the man I want to be.

I quit social media a few years ago because who fucking cares. I don’t have tik tok or engage with other forms of short form media. But that wasn’t enough, I needed to go deeper and reflect on how my heart and mind are set to “consume”. What if through this process I could find a bit of myself that I feel like I’ve lost. Maybe I could be found by my God again, instead of feeling like He’s lost among the refuse.

I’ve been hybriding all of my books for the past few years. It started as me wanting to increase my pace for the stuff that I read so that I could read more widely by completing books faster. It works. My numbers have multiplied the past couple years. I even have specific audiobook readers that I look out for, like Scott Brick and Dion Graham. That’s just it, I’ve been completing books. Not reading them. Consuming books.

I even had an idea a few years ago where I wanted to put together little reviews of the books I read and put them on this site. I stopped because that would mean I would have to pause between books long enough to review them. The last sentence of a book would lead into the opening line of another. Always “reading”, always moving, always consuming.

I don’t want to do this anymore. I want to be a reflective person. I want to be a person that “remembers”. It is not enough for me to read to consume anymore. I want to read, to read. And I want to write. Maybe this practice can help me go deeper into myself and enjoy the things I read more. My brain wasn’t made to consume endlessly, my brain was made to pause and reflect and change. Kander very rudely told me “maybe everything you do doesn’t have to be ‘ranked competitive’ ___”. Maybe he’s right.

I’ll start with a review of Dune Messiah, and then maybe other thoughts of mine will turn over in the process.

Have no fear

C Randir