DNFing books is so damn painful

Recently I've finally started allowing myself to DNF books. I think I DNF'd something like 11 books last year 😱

Last week I DNF'd a book after reading 10 pages of it. That is by far the quickest I've ever given up on a book. In the wake of that, I've been thinking a little about why it's so painful to DNF a book. I used to suffer through a book I didn't like just for the sake of completion. In my ripe old age of 28 though, I decided that life is too short to suffer through bad books. I still do it sometimes though because it does, honestly, feel so bad to give up on a book.

This might just be a me thing since I'm not a big TV watcher, but I've picked up and abandoned more shows than I can remember without even a second thought. I have pretty much no investment in seeing TV shows through. The thing about the way that I watch TV is that I'm always on my phone while watching. My attention is pretty much always split when I'm watching TV. I'm never immersed in a TV show world. With books, however, I physically cannot engage in anything other than the book while I'm reading.

Something that I learned from How to Do Nothing is that our split attention is what the greater construct of capitalism and the attention economy are aiming to cultivate. Having split attention decreases our investment in any one thing, making us more easily swayable consumers.

This isn't a post about the value of TV vs. reading or the holier-than-though standpoint that sometimes exists around books. I think this applies to anything that people are interested in. Focused attention increases our sense of duty or investment to whatever it is we are intentionally attentive to. I similarly have a very hard time abandoning video games that I don't like (although it's a bit easier because I usually abandon games that are too hard, and I'm lazy about struggling through leisure activities. I have to do enough of that for work 😅) because I physically can't split my attention while playing a game.

I'm seeing the implications of attention everywhere now that I've become aware of the ways that we are constantly being tempted to split our attention. I can't pay attention to a TV show because the possibility of finding something more interesting on my phone is too easily accessible. But I'll suffer for weeks through the end of a mediocre book because I've already invested some amount of undivided attention into it.

This is a bit off topic, but I think there's also something to be said for engaging with physical objects vs. non-physical. I'm much more likely to listen to one of my vinyl records with the intention of listening to it from top to bottom compared to streaming the same album on Apple Music.

There's a really great article that I have linked on my bookmarks page called The erosion of personal ownership that I think does a great job of digging into this topic.

“When we own something, it becomes us,” Belk tells Vox. “We’ve imprinted on it.” He mentions, as examples, the notes made in margins of books or the dings and dents objects gain through use. “In that sense we’re not only saying that it’s ours, we’re making it uniquely ours,” he adds, “rather than a generic, fungible object that could be replaced by another.”

The hardest books to put down are ones that I physically own or have loaned from the library vs. ones that I read on my phone or kindle.

By buying a book, I give it a future place on the bookshelves in my home that I feel extreme ownership and pride over. Depite being written by other people, I feel uniquely identified with the books that I have. When I am reading a book that I buy, and then don't like it, it's like a mini loss of something that I've imprinted on through holding, seeing, envisioning on my shelf, and physically engaging with.

Same for video games- all video games that I own as a disc, I've finished. Even with library books, the act of holding it, seeing it daily on my nightstand, noticing the marks left by others in the pages-- all this adds to the experience of engaging with the physical object that is lost when I read on my kindle or phone. It becomes a physical experience rather than a digital one easily forgotten when you power off.