Accidental Experiment

erikah(83)

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It wasn't my intention to do this experiment, it was accidental, as the title says, it just happened, but I'm glad I paid attention to it as it can serve me in the future, to get better.

In the recent months, unfortunately I had to spend some hours in different waiting rooms. When I say hours, I mean at least two hours each time, sometimes even longer, waiting for someone to complete therapy. These occasions were planned, so I went prepared each time and tried to use the time wisely.

The obvious and handy solution for many is to spend the time on your phone, but honestly, I didn't want that. I can do that anywhere, anytime, but it rarely happens to have two hours that I can spend reading. Why? There's a good reason for that too and unfortunately, the screen always beats reading.

Most likely you'd say reading in a waiting room shared with at least 10 people has its challenges and I totally agree with you. Even if no one is speaking, which is excluded, there, the (repetitive AI) music playing, people move around and make different noises, so it's definitely challenging.

For me it was an exercise on how to exclude, shut out the noise.

The first few times there was a smaller waiting room with like 10, 12 people constantly rotating. Some came, others got called in and many were chatting with the person they came with, or to the one next to them. There was the repetitive AI music playing as well, so you can say that the noise was quite an amalgam of sounds.

On the first day I thought it'll be impossible to focus in these conditions, especially that the book I brought with me was a technical book, not a novel or something light, but I was wrong. Surprisingly, I was able to focus and read a good part of the book, which is quite an achievement, no matter how you look at it.

This week we had an appointment in a brand new clinic, where conditions are up to 2026's standards. The waiting room was quite big, with comfortable armchairs and tables, and people were less than you'd expect. When I saw it, I said this is a lucky break, I can spend the upcoming 2, 3 hours reading calmly, which I did, but the focus was not the same. This may look surprising and I was surprised too.

What happened? At the second location, there were only 2 people besides me. There was no music, the only noise beside the human made one was provided by the ventilation system. The monotone noise by the ventilation system I was able to ignore, but the different noise the other two people made, individually, that was interrupting. It seems like multiple noise sources and bigger volume is easier to ignore, or at least easier for me.

If you ask a specialist, most likely there's an explanation for why this happened. Worst case scenario they would say I'm retarded and can't focus, but finding and explanation, whatever it would be, won't help me in any way, so next time I need to do better and try to focus more.

While writing this post was thinking how our behavior and abilities change. So many people can't focus for more than 5 minutes and get bored, lose focus when they need to read 500, 1000 words articles. Now with AI and audio options, they don't even need to, but where does this lead? How are they going to sharpen their skills? They would most likely argue that there's no need to read anymore as AI does the job for you, but what are you without AI?

A couple of decades ago, short form content was not really available as newspaper and magazine articles were longer that social media posts are today. Micro blogging, or short content social media platforms appeared around 1997, but got popular mostly around 2005 - 2006, with Twitter and Facebook. Today people are used to read the headlines on X, and if there's an article linked to it, they ask Grok to summarize it as TL;DR. These options can come in handy as time is always limited, but does it help get better in focusing, when reading longer texts? I highly doubt it.

Many people don't even read today, they prefer to listen to audiobooks. When you read, you go at your own pace and the pace is dictated by your capability of comprehending what you read. When someone reads to you, you can either keep up with the reader, or you miss a good part due to losing focus.

Technology is great, we're getting new tools every day that can make our lives easier in a way, but can make us dumber as well.

There were times when cashiers had to calculate the amount of change to give back to the buyer, as there were no apps to do it for them. They had a sharp mind, they were good at math. Look at them now. Take away the cash register and they can't count back the change to you anymore.

So many kids can't read the analog clock as everything is digital. Most likely handwriting is going to be considered special art soon as most people prefer to take digital notes and the less you write, the worse your handwriting gets.

I think it comes down to individual preference. You can choose to be 100% dependent on technology, or you can use it, but still keep your skills sharp as you never know.