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Notes -
So I read 89 books last year (details can be found in the wellness Wednesday thread). Many people here and more so in real life seem to pretty surprised, and impressed. I'm not sure if this is me being a time (or hobby) snob, but I'm a little dissapointed in this kind of reaction. In the real world this makes some sense: TV and scrolling are much more appealing than a book after a long day at work, but I was hoping to see more serious readers in a place that's as text and argument heavy as the motte.
Reading a lot of books isn't as hard as it seems. The average american spends something like 4+ hours on the internet+TV. If you take 1 of those hours and convert them into reading every day you get 365 hours a year. At 50 pages/hour, that's 15k pages a year, or about 50 300-page books. I read slightly faster and slightly more, but also a significant amount in Spanish, which is slower. So probably 2 hrs/day at an average of 50 pages/hour. That's about 30k pages. If I look at my goodreads, I read 33,885 pages total. I keep more detailed stats for Spanish. Looks like I read for a total of 227 hours for a total of 11k pages, which is about 45 pages/hour. Of course these numbers vary from person to person, and book to book. All very do-able for the average Mottzian. It just means largely giving up other forms of entertaininment, like video games or TV, and perhaps more importantly, not being a workaholic.
So are my expectations for this place off? Am I overestimating the importance of books to the average Mottzian (and in self-cultivation in general)? Underestimating people's daily time commitments?
There are a lot of things that you can get surprisingly good at with just a one-hour investment daily. I picked up running about 10 years ago and currently run right around an hour per day based on logs (some variance by week, of course). This results in ~55 miles per week of running and now, nearly 40 years old, I'm competitive with college runners. If you offered me more running or more books, I'd absolutely take the running - I'm just limited by injury avoidance. Of course, if I really wanted to dedicate myself to aerobic fitness, I could tack on another few hours of biking and swimming without much of an injury tax to pay.
Of course, I could still fit in more reading as well - it's not like my schedule is genuinely that tightly packed. The point is that at some level, you have to start picking and choosing which things you want to be good at and when you're going to stop trying to self-cultivate and just play Slay the Spire or something. I think reading 33,885 pages in a year is great. I think being as strong as @FiveHourMarathon is great. I think being an excellent parent (as many Mottizens surely are) is even better! But, ultimately, one is limited in their mental and physical resources and we cannot be all things to all people.
So, yeah, I guess the punchline is that you're overestimating books to the average local denizen in all likelihood. I like reading (and read voraciously as a teen), but I don't like it more than going to bar trivia with friends, going to my run club with friends, watching the Bills game on Sunday, or just shitposting on the internet. Replacing the latter with more reading would be good, but I bet I won't do it.
Congrats on the running! I also too run around 7 hours a week (although I would like to run closer to 10-11, injury prevention is holding me back). I agree it's very hard to balance more than a few hobbies. I'm struggling with this as I try to learn Italian on top of my English and Spanish, and also with fitting in biking and swimming during triathlon season (swimming is the real problem because I have a stationary bike in my bedroom).
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