GENERAL BOOK/READING THREAD 
How do you find time to read lotsa books ? Anytips +input. I dont really wanna cut into my little game time and time for painting. But I also wanna read more books. Atm I have read 5 to 6 short 300-400 page books a year which is good if I compare it to the fact that I read 0 books in some years before.
I “think” I could up my yearly books to 7-8 but 10 would prolly feel like im pushing it (if we talk about 300-400page books on average)
Gimme your thoughts or praise (for being a good boi who reads books) I know its not theory just ficiton but I just really started to read again in the last 3 years so Im easing myself into it by reading 40k novels. Its chill and mostly simple I also read some Brandon Sanderson fantasy novels. I know not high art but you gotta start somewhere.
EDIT : Good thread. Thanks for everyone who participated
This is my experience, and I need to preface it with this: I don’t manage this perfectly, i just know the strategy works when i execute it:
First off, you need to have some awareness of why you form routines and habits. If you’re sober, you get dopamine largely from external activities, and engaging activities. Things that stimulate, beckon you to give input - you mention gaming and painting (same tbh) - Why do you think you’re so connected to gaming? It’s stimulating. It needs constant input, engagement, it’s flashy, it’s engaging almost all of your senses and your thought capacity in a totalizing manner - this is hijacking your reward pathways. It may not be as ruinous as, say, recreational drugs can be, but this is still addictive; even if not, it’s certainly habit forming.
You mentally need the tools to deny yourself. Not to become a monk or ascetic, but things like mindfulness and meditation can help because they train you to pull back from external stimuli and engage them differently. If you do this, once you start detaching, I’m telling you, your mind will start to re-order its own priorities and deprecate cheap thrills.
Cultivating a sense of joy in learning and experiencing information in your internal world isn’t that difficult, but you need to sort of make sure that other stimuli are set aside. I will turn my computer off and leave electronics out of my reading space so that no vibration, no alert, nothing will ask me for attention - there is so much bullshit calling you to attention that makes a passive activity like reading extremely hard to do.
you can think of your relationship to the world as something inside a meatsuit that is raised from birth to react to what’s outside it. If you do not question or manage this relationship, you will always be pulled outside of yourself by the most engaging/pressing/conditioned thing in your environment.
This is a lot of words without even getting to the task of reading, but this is the stuff that I personally had to internally wrangle before I ever found time to start reading and self study again.
You can rewire yourself to find pleasure in productive tasks. Eschewing marketed entertainment for skill and knowlege building sounds boring, but once you’ve trained yourself to get dopamine from those things it just becomes a new normal.
You’re gonna have to find the discipline to construct a new routine that devalues something like gaming and replaces it with something like reading, and in 2025 that’s not actually easy.
While I think you are spot on. The main problem is I spend to much time on the internet- mostly follow world news and US news slop (I have relatives in the USA so Im allowed to care about the yankees) Its really just mindless browsing that is my real time killer.
On a different note since you mentioned joy. I already experience joy or happiness (or dare I say hype) when reading good chapters or passages in books. Its just a come and go kinda feeling.
The fix stays the same. The part of your brain that says you need to be plugged into that slop is a liar. ignore the liar. you know inside what you need to do, or you wouldn’t be here asking this stuff.
Nobody teaches you to take the reins; capital wants people that are good at being steered, not good at driving. You have to do it yourself. Treat those impulses like the cop in your brain trying to keep you asleep, because that’s what it is.
What works for me is downloading ebooks, catching myself when I’m mindlessly scrolling, and then deliberately switching to the ebooks for my “phone time”. You just need to find books that are engaging enough and make a habit of it
Honestly, thank you for this comment. I’ve been struggling similarly to OP for a long time and these are things I very much needed to hear.
It’s quite funny to me that you phrase this like this because I was talking to my partner, literally in tears, sometime last week about how I felt like I genuinely needed to live the life of an ascetic in order to be anywhere close to achieving and maintaining the goals I have to develop myself positively as a person. Like, I don’t understand how my brain can do a task like reading, feel absolutely amazing afterwards, and then still feel like there’s some insurmountable hurdle in doing the task again the next time still. It’s genuinely baffling.
I phrased it that way because I get genuine hermit/monkish urges that just aren’t strong enough to sustain that commitment, but it often came from a yearning to break away from useless and time wasting habits.
I am more spiritually inclined than most of Hexbear is going to be, so I engage in these practices for more than material reasons, but I often find that the strongest anchors for why i’m doing something like mindfulness is material - I want to overcome the domination of external stimuli over my own will.
Friend, this is going to be hard work, and you should not expect overnight success (if you find that, I will be so happy for you, just don’t give up if this takes a while).
I’m not a buddhist, but the best manual on mindfulness I’ve ever read was The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh. It’s a complilation of letters and advice he gave when he was younger, and it’s short, concise, and will get you started, and I must recommend you read it (and practice it while you read it!) if you want to start taking control of your inner and outer processes.
there is no greater freedom than realizing you can step off all these treadmills eating into your psyche whenever you want, and that your discomfort towards doing so is temporary and largely illusory.
I’m of a similar mind, which is why that specific phrasing caught my eye. I always have a deep yearning to just be better and it’s felt like the only way I know how to reach towards that is to remove the things that seemed to be impeding me. But this also came with the drawback of feeling like I can’t have anything at all, which is also just not a healthy mindset.
I’d actually say I’m in a similar camp. I wouldn’t describe myself as spiritual, but I also certainly wouldn’t describe my main motivations for personal change as mostly material. My main goal was always to just be present and be at peace with myself. As someone who is (mostly) sober, my main impetus for that decision always was, as you say, that I wasn’t comfortable with an external stimuli ruling over me. My motivations were always less material and more internal, however. I can’t be reliably present, emotionally and physically, for myself, my loved ones, and my community if I’m always beholden to a substance.
This gave me a bit of a chuckle. I love and appreciate the sentiment, and this isn’t the space to go into details, but my journey has already been a long one. I do thank you for helping to empower my spirit while going through the process though!
I have a volunteer shift at the library tomorrow evening so I’ll be sure to check if that book is in their catalog! It sounds interesting. I appreciate you sharing your experiences and wisdom and I appreciate you!