/lit/ - Literature

is poetry inherently feminine?

I sometimes worry that the stagnation I experienced in my early years, as a result of parents who never encouraged reading and laugh when Shakespeare or Kant are mentioned, had irreparable consequences on my mind developmentally. When I was young I would watch TV and play video games. I always did well in English class, because it was one of the only classes I found interesting in school. But when I would go to pick up a book I would always find that I would struggle to maintain my focus on it. Fast forward to my early 20s, I started reading some books; In The Miso Soup, The Wasp Factory, 1984, and I felt that I was missing out on stuff.

I had become bored with video games and I hadn't watched television in years, I had mostly switched to writing posts on forums online. I was unable to finish a single semester of college after 3 attempts, after which I took 4 years off of college due to being overwhelmed with anxiety and sadness. In my solitude, laying around in my apartment listening to music laying on the floor, I decided that my life is what I make of it. I picked up books and started to read. I read Moby Dick, I read Notes From Underground, and while I didn't finish those 2 in particular, or other difficult books, I did finish several dozen. I started reading philosophy, I started with the sections covering the Greeks in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. I decided it was time for me to go back to college. I switched my major from psychology to philosophy, and I got an A in every class I've taken for the past 4 semesters.

I push myself harder to read, even though sometimes my brain doesn't even process a line after I read it. It's because of video games which give you fast impulse stimulation (as opposed to slow analytical thinking), that your brain expects stimulation to simply arrive in your brain and for you to "press a button" to interact with it, if you will, as opposed to processing what is on the page which one never does when they play a video game or watch youtube. The modern age has done the thinking for us, and there has been evidence that use of social media in particular is lowering people's attention spans. Even professors have difficulty immersing themselves in longer reading material. Many of us are left with brains which have become neglected, shrivelled, and developmentally handicapped.

I sometimes worry that the stagnation I experienced in my early years, a result of parents who never encouraged reading and laugh when Shakespeare or Kant are mentioned, which I worry had irreparable consequences on my mind developmentally. When I was young I would watch TV and play video games. I always did well in English class, because it was one of the only classes I found interesting in school. But when I would go to pick up a book I would always find that I would struggle to maintain my focus on it. Fast forward to my early 20s, I started reading some books; In The Miso Soup, The Wasp Factory, 1984, and I felt that I was missing out on stuff.

Soon after I decided that I was completely bored with video games, and I decided that my brain was wasting away. I took 4 years off of college, where I didn't finish a single semester because every time I would become overwhelmed with anxiety, and I could never push myself to finish 1 class. In my solitude, laying around in my apartment listening to music laying on the floor, I decided that my life is what I make of it. I picked up books and started to read. I read Moby Dick, I read Notes From Underground, and while I didn't finish those 2 in particular, or other difficult books, I did finish several dozen. I started reading philosophy, I started with the sections covering the Greeks in Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy. I decided it was time for me to go back to college. I switched my major from psychology to philosophy, and I got an A in every class I've taken for the past 4 semesters.

I push myself harder to read, even though sometimes my brain doesn't even process a line after I read it. It's because of video games which give you fast impulse stimulation (as opposed to slow analytical thinking), that your brain expects stimulation to simply arrive in your brain and for you to "press a button" to interact with it, if you will, as opposed to processing what is on the page which one never does when they play a video game or watch youtube. The modern age has done the thinking for us, and there has been evidence that use of social media in particular is lowering people's attention spans. Even professors have difficulty immersing themselves in longer reading material. Many of us are left with brains which have become neglected, shrivelled, and developmentally handicapped.