Growing up in a quaint rural town where high-powered people from NYC liked to "get away", this is very common situation, and the inability to disconnect and adopt a slower attitude was, IMO, the primary cause of friction between the weekenders and the locals. They would physically get away from the city, but were unable to mentally release the blend of Type-A competitive neuroses that helped them get ahead in the city but just made them come off as obnoxious in this slower, quieter place.

I've found myself in this mode before, too. A couple of years ago I was preparing for weeklong wilderness backpacking trip with some friends. I'd recently quit my high-stress job to take some time off, and I had a few new pieces of gear I wanted to test before relying on them on a longer trip. When I looked at the calendar, though, every weekend before we were to leave was already spoken for.

I was worrying about it to my wife, trying to decide whether I'd just have to use the old worn out gear or risk it with the new stuff, when she stopped me: "why don't you just... go on Monday?" It took me a second to even get what she was saying—I was still so much in work-all-the-time-mode that my brain didn't even consider whatsoever the possibility that I could just... go off and go camping on a weekday. I was really baffled for a moment, and I've reflected on that a bit since, it's funny how you can be trapped in your own default operating mode and not even realize it.

I'm not really a resort person. But I do subscribe to some travel feeds mostly in the vein of maybe finding some places/attractions/restaurants/etc. that I'm not familiar with. The number of hyper-scheduled spreadsheets I see is amazing. Doesn't mean I don't often have some itinerary and even book some particular, popular attractions/venues. But the 30-minute block scheduling is something I do for work (if that).

ADDED: I'll just add that I created a loose spreadsheet for a ~week-long NYC trip with (I think) just one timed admission for a recently reopened museum and no times otherwise. I think I ended up dynamically scrawling over the printout with changes for most of the trip.

I was like this but maybe not as stressful as you described. Still, I wanted to do stuff and see stuff during vacation.

After having kids, my habit changed. Now we enjoy going to local parks and walking around with no goals during vacation. This wonderful attraction? Nah we don't need to see it. If we can walk there, then maybe.

I have a hard time doing anything when in a nice resort. If it’s too nice, you just want to hangout at your pool villa all day and enjoy the view.

What did you get out of this comment? What do you think a reader gets? Maybe follow the spirit of the article: slow down and pounder, be curious, maybe you would have gotten the right take away instead of being antagonizing towards someone's fond memory.

We can get stuck in our minds and lean too much on prior skills instead of fully assessing the problem at hand. More likely than not, given he was a contractor, building a trench and walls seemed like a simple solution to something he has probably dealt with many time and didn't think twice about it.

Arizona, Lake Havasu, triple digit temperatures. We spent more time in the water than out of it. Us kids loved the flooded camp because of the tiny fish that would swim up and nibble on our toes. It tickled. The camp was boat access only, and there were a few million acres of desert wilderness higher ground to move up to. The water rose gradually and the tents never got wet.

The bigger problem with that camp was the rattlesnakes. I killed one with the shovel and felt grown up.

They moved the tents.

I've read that Tolkien wrote There and Back Again / The Hobbit as a book for his children. Then he started writing what would become The Fellowship of The Ring for his kids, but he quickly realized that the story was taking many dark turns and that he was best served by moving away from writing it as a book for his kids.

> Tolkien was a top language scholar who spoke several even dead languages, so there’s a lot more going on than just the surface plot of Frodo “returning” Bilbo’s ring.

If you want to see it then way Tolkien saw it, probably the best way is to get through all that unimportant stuff involving rings and battles as quickly as possible to get to the appendices where Tolkein spent his time thinking about the history and etymology and even neat little details like how the calendar worked in the Shire...

(I'm only half joking)

One might also argue that The Little Prince is "far more complex" and deeper than anything written at a typical adult reading level. That lower linguistic surface complexity allows more space for the reader to explore ideas and themes.

I'm skeptical. Is there no more value to series like Gormenghast, Book of the New Sun, and The Second Apocalypse, beyond mere literary masochism, compared to LotR? Like them or not, LotR, as elaborate as its mythology is (if you include Silmarillion and some or all of the History of Middle Earth), is not at the same level.

> One would be mad to simply skim it through.

Reminds me of an ah-ha! moment I had as a kid playing a text adventure game on my C64. I was stuck for a while and tried to find alternative ways forwards. I typed in "cheat" and it replied "OK, you win!" and ended the game.

I don't know. I enjoyed it in tweens and high school, couldn't get into it again in later life.

I just blurt out "processing" when they start looking at me weird. People tend to take it well.

"Give me a second" is something I say when someone just has to break the silence with some unproductive comment. Having 20-30 seconds to think silently should be a completely normal thing.

”Thinking longer for a better answer”

> typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.

I find it absolutely is much of the time - I'll determine the architecture/overall solution, know exactly what needs to go in a multitude of files, and now actualizing all that isn't really thinking anymore, just donkey work. Getting AI to do this has been incredible now that it's finally good enough. I've had Copilot make flawless 500+LOC C++ classes in the first pass, and when I introduced bugs by changing it by hand, it found them instantly from stack traces without even having symbols, saving me hours. I see a future where writing a large codebase all by hand is seen like raising a barn the Amish way with no powertools - impressive and maybe there's something to be said for it philosophically, but just not practical otherwise.

> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close. Plus, while typing is when I'm doing my best debugging and best simplifying.

As you sort of point out between the lines, it depends on what you work on. I had an AI agent rewrite some ancient (and terrible code) which had stopped working because the v1 of an api on v3 was sunset. It took around 5 minutes out of my day, and most of those were having two people explaining to me where the code was and what they thought had happened to make it break. It would've like taken me a full day to fix without AI because I would have needed to understand things first, and because it was quite a lot of code.

The result wasn't very good, but it was better than what was before, and since that had run for years without anyone tuching it, well... good enough. Heck, it might've taken me more than a day because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".

Aside from this anecdote I think AI writes a good 80% of my code these days. I'm not sure I buy the whole "bottleneck or not" discussion around typing. I think for a lot of people, myself included, AI does 10x part of the process of writing software. Where it doesn't help is when you need to do computer science, and as you point out, those parts AI don't speed up. I sometimes still use AI for computer science parts, but in those situations the AI will be a rubber duck because I tend to think by talking out my own ideas, and at least the AI duck pretends to answer. Even if the answer is more useless than what the actual rubber duck comes up with, which it usually is, it's more immersive for me.

  > because I doubt I would have left it at "wasn't very good".

If shrug-guy is anything like me, he sat there blurting out half-baked ideas and then shooting them down all in his internal monologue, instead of out loud.

For me, I sometimes feel like I'm an old school chess engine, exploring as many possible moves/ideas as I can - as many steps into the future as time allows. Constantly evaluating them based on some known-simplified fitness function usually involving pattern recognition from past experience in similar problems. Eventually I arrive at a place where I'm either confident I know a reasonable way forward (and why some of the obvious ways forward are unlikely to be ideal) - or I've scatter-gun searched all of the quickly available ideas and discovered I have no idea if some of them are good or bad, and I need to do much deeper research and investigation of the problem.

From the outside, that'd look identical to "he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips"

> I'll be honest, this is the big reason I don't get all the hype around coding agents. I do find them useful but typing isn't the bottleneck. Not even close.

It's always possible to go slower for practically no cost. -- So, any benefit from going slower is obtainable for everyone.

Whereas, typing faster takes discipline and effort. There are diminishing benefits to putting in more effort to type faster.

The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.

  > typing faster takes discipline and effort.

  >> ***typing isn't the bottleneck***

  > The main benefit isn't so much "more output" so much as "reduced latency". e.g. It takes less time to type out queries that help you gather information.

Nice statistical problem! I only thought of a solution that is valid for many cars and few worksheet spots. Were you able to fully solve it on the spot?

> For the same reason I have decided I don't like fast travel in games.

I was playing Wing Commander, Privateer way back when (mid-1990's) and didn't realize that there were ways to travel faster. So I did the obvious: I pretended I was a trader on a long haul route, dug out some books and notebooks, and just did whatever until I arrived at my destination or was attacked by pirates. I loved the passive game play in the moment, but I didn't realize how much until about a decade later. That kinda ruined gaming for me in general since games tend to keep the player busy (even if they aren't action games).

In some respects, I think that slow travel offers a sense of authenticity to the game. Well, I should say to some games. Many games set out goals for players. It's obvious why. If there is nothing to accomplish, there is little sense of accomplishment. Yet goals also ruin things in my mind since there is an urgency to get things done to see what the outcome is. Of course, games also reward following up on that urgency. That's contrary to real life where you may be rewarded or you may have to wait upon the rewards.

Valheim does that so well. The feeling of walking through an unfamiliar forest and stumbling across a faint trail that you made weeks ago, knowing that it will eventually lead you back to your old base and thus back to where you were trying to get to before you got lost…

Reading the Reddit for the game, filled with people complaining that the portal system is too restrictive and forces them to make upwards of three long boat trips over the course of the game is a bit sad. It’s as though they expect the fun to happen when they finish everything, but the fun all happens while you’re actually playing the game.

The hardcore mode of Kingdom Come: Deliverance really made me appreciate the game (although that's the only way I played it). It became a very immersive experience.

Valheim without a map would be a bit too much for me. No way to quickly escape to some safe green pastures sounds too stressful :).

I do agree, playing open world games without fast travel can be a bit of a slog though. I considered playing Skyrim without fast travel but many of the quests make you run half way across the map and back multiple times.

Without fast travel you’d be forced to plan your trips more and bundle all the tasks in an area which would be cool. But it’s probably too much to ask for the general public who will see it as annoying.

I'm thinking of the The Forest survival game. The first one in the series was great.

The successor game added an in-game compass/radar which detracted from the immersion, made the world feel small and boring.

That’s a book I’ve been taking my time with. Read a bit every few weeks. Found the part about visual memory mechanics resonated: I have to spread everything out and see it when doing mechanic work.

No to doing books via audiobook because I see the words in my head and it’s massively distracting. Cool if it works for others I guess but like the mechanic excerpt above… not for me.

Listening to someone talking is how humanity transmitted culture and stories for tens of thousands of years. The fact that "we" cannot tolerate it anymore, is a sign of how badly our brains are being reshaped (or maybe damaged) by screens.

Not the OP, but to me audio generally x2 slower than I read, so I’m content with the speed, anything slower than that would be weird pace for many stuff.

Having said that yes I do indeed pause if I need to take a moment to think, and I roll back 15 seconds if I want to hear it again. Not a big deal, just part of the experience. -signed ex-hater of audiobooks

I think a long drive in the car is complemented exceptionally well by audiobooks.

and audiobooks with really good narrators? the miles will melt away.

(I like Wil Wheaton)

(don't know about lotr oudiobooks)

(currently part way through we are legion read by ray porter)

An audiobook is bad if you want to go extra slow. I don't think I want to go that slow.

The article advocates not rushing. In general, that's a good fit for audiobooks.

The article literally says:

> limiting myself to mouth-speed

Audiobooks are mouth-speed.

The article suggests this is the right slow speed, at least for the author.

Maybe you yourself want even slower, but that's not what the article is suggesting.

Not each sentence but I do regularly pause and sometimes skip back in audiobooks, yes.

Use the playback speed settings, tough hitting pause every once in a while is also a good idea

Audible and most audiobook player apps let you control the speed. I usually listen at 1.25 to 1.5

First of all, I don’t recommend going through life yucking someone else’s yum.

Second of all, I took TFA advice and read that article with the slowness and deliberate attention it recommended and found it to be trite and difficult to distinguish from AI slop… but if that’s what brings this person joy, good for them.

Who cares if the GP eats their cookies in one bite and listens to their audiobooks at 2.25x speed? Because one self help guru turned blogger said it’s a bad idea?

Then just use 0.75 or 0.5x speed? I don't understand this question.

I hate audiobooks because they're way too slow and full of moods/tones that often contradict how I would have read it. I can't be the only one who thinks they're overindulgent and annoying.

He does lots of different voices, it's very good

> "Fly-ses you foool-ses", exclaimed stupid, dry tricksy one

I do something similar, only keeping my lips shut and moving my tongue and throat as if I was speaking. I find it's an intermediate speed between conversation speed and purely reading with my eyes. I started doing it when I wasn't so good at English to give myself time to understand the text, as well as to practice the mechanics of English speech when I didn't have anyone, but I find keeping me at this pace gives me maximum comprehension. I have a friend who reads much faster than me and he quite often misses points in whatever he's reading. I think he got into that habit from literature, but it's disastrous when reading something more densely packed with information, like technical documentation.

Oh, I forgot to mention—reading out loud (silently or not) does work, but then I find it difficult to actually pay attention to what I’m reading.

Like you, I do proofread this way, and for that it works well.

Yes.

This is definitely a disadvantage of audiobooks, although I’ve found having access to a `skip backwards 15 seconds` button can help a lot.

(There was one point during Riyria Revelations where a character was explaining how Elven succession works. After repeating the sequence a bunch of times, I finally had to get out my laptop and take notes.)

I did! It took me a few months though. You just have to work at it a lot and be very conscious of your speech.

I feel like winnie the pooh won't lose much from having seen the film version beforehand, but also the books had the kind of whimsical humour that I enjoyed a lot more in college than I did as a kid.

You're at a good time for The Hobbit. Strangely I find that Winnie the Pooh does not age well and is an awkward read.

The Wind in the Willows is good beginning around that age too.

Well done, when I was growing up we would always have some time in the evening when we would read a book out loud. When we were younger my parents would read and as we got older we would read sometimes too. I tried the same with my daughter but she stopped wanting to when she was around 10, but she’s in a better space now two years on so I’m going to try to resurrect the custom. It’s a really lovely thing to do as a family, but as the article suggests is quite strange these days and it can be difficult and require discipline to make the time.

For younger kids I can heartily recommend the Hobbit illustrated by Jemima Catlin- has plenty of pictures to them engaged. Read it to my 6 year old and we’re now excited for LotR.

I'm wondering if using an electric caravan is a similarly good option for slow travelling on land. It would force you to you stop after less than 300 kilometers, unfold the solar panels on the roof, wait a day or two (perhaps also catch some rain using the roof) and then continue.

Another, less romantic option would be to recharge it somewhere faster ;-)

I initially thought this was just a function of reading the same thing multiple times, but I’ve since had it happen many times when reading something completely new. Somehow my mind wanders and when I tune back in, not only am I reading clearly, I’m still doing the voicing for different characters. It’s so weird.

By the 3rd week of Goodnight Moon at bedtime, are you still reading the printed words?

The "mood" is the information too.

> presumably political speeches from Republican America combines the best of those two?

Why?

> Even Obamas detractors admit he spoke well. True, but i find JFKs speeches are on a different level from that. And it's not just him, but the contrast is particularly striking.

My off the cuff observation is that there is a lot less mastery of language than there used to be in America. I'm not really sure why, but compare the grand language used by the early political leaders to, say, Obama, and it's striking. And that's not saying Obama is a bad speaker! He has a ton of charisma and makes you want to like his ideas by the way he presents them. But he's never given something on the level of Lincoln's Gettysburg address (in my opinion at least).

Yes, in the English translation

Haven’t gotten around to re-reading Dostoyevsky. But Turgenev’s English translations absolutely benefit from slow reading.

Good to know!

I've not read enough Corey to form a judgement, but I don't think Jordan has nearly enough literary "heft" to satisfy close reading. Don't get me wrong: the story is fun - I enjoyed every bit of Wheel of Time - and would recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing, but the deeper stuff (characters, prosidy, world-building, thematic "meaning") don't bear much examination.

In fantasy / sci-fi, I'd unreservedly recommend:

- Ursula K LeGuin

- Steven Erickson

- Gene Wolfe

With reservations, I'd recommend:

- Patrick Rothfuss (unfinished)

- George RR Martin (unfinished; sometimes dodgy prose, but occasionally transcendent character and theme)

- Dune (just know it goes downhill fast after the first book)

Elsewhere, but still genre (ie: meant to be entertaining, not uber-serious, self-conscious "literature"):

- Patrick O'Brian

- Arthur Conan Doyle

- Dorothy Dunnet

I'd recommend Rudyard Kipling's short stories, but they're hit and miss, and sometimes out of step with modern mores. Maybe stick with the Jungle Book, and Just So Stories, and if you like those make sure you read Without Benefit of Clergy, They (short stories), and Kim (a masterpiece of a novel).

Once you've got through those, Hemingway is approachable, and the true modernist master. Fiesta / The Sun Also Rises (same book, known by different names in different parts of the world) is ironic and beautiful; A Farewell to Arms is beautiful and almost unbearably sad; his short stories are impeccable.