[praash]

> -- eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification.

I have lost the ability to search for information online when I'm not solving a specific technical problem. My eyes jump over paragraphs as if performing a binary search to find the sections I'm interested in - obviously a bad approach for less orderly documents.

Search Engine Optimized spam keeps me encouraged to habitually skip large chunks of text.

HN is mostly a safe harbor of high quality content, but I still have a bad habit of completely skipping most HN headlines, or jumping to read the comments before even considering to read the article. That's basically letting the crowd digest and summarize posts for me.

This was a satisfying read and worth the short time to patiently digest it.

[Fade_Dance]

I've been thinking about physically printing out my articles for the day and reading them in some sort of lounge chair situation.

For me it's something to do with the screen. The more "skim reading" I do on screens, the more the practice becomes habitually embedded and hard to break away from, like my mind is set up to do that when I'm working with a monitor.

Maybe meeting half-way will work, like having a big e-paper e-reader where I (batch-export to PDF) all of the long-form content I want to process that day.