Then I Was…

I have always liked to read, but have not always read. There have been times in my life when I did not feel the internal motivation to pick up a book. There have been times in my life when I did feel the internal motivation to pick up a book. A lot of the time, I do with my free time the classic things that you’d imagine a guy’s guy such as myself to be doing with his free time. Drinking Bud Light (nectar of the gods), Snapchatting girls, and ripping video games in the living room with my roommates. All electric, but needless to say not the most fulfilling activities.

I think my pivot in attitude toward reading began at the start of COVID. I would spend countless isolated hours on the couch watching TV or video games. We’ve all done it and its fun at the time, but as time went on I became frustrated. I had all the time in the world, but I wasn’t working toward anything that would help me achieve my long term goals. To me, purpose = happiness, and i felt like I was living without a sense of purpose. I was just watching frivolous TV series that weren’t teaching me anything or benefitting my long-term success.

Queue reading as a hobby. I developed an interest in reading American classics and nonfiction books on sociology, American history, and psychology.

My intrinsic interest in American classics stems from the fact that I, along with everybody else on this planet, do not have that much time to sit down and read. With the time I do spend reading, I want to be reading the best of the best in fiction. Cha feel?

My interest in the nonfiction categories comes from my desire to learn more about people and how we function in society. I want to understand how we got to where we’re at societally, what the issues are, and how we can fix them. Learning about American history helps me establish context on how we got here. Learning about sociology helps me understand how humans interact. Learning about psychology helps me understand how our brains work and how we act individually.

Now, I spend a decent amount of my free time reading books. I wish I could say I spent more, but to be honest, Succession is a really enticing TV show.

For Then I Was, my mother and I thought it would be interesting to do a literature blog portion where we write about what we are reading. We won’t be doing the call & response type for every book though, because we don’t read all the same books :/.