🔗 Share this article

When I was a youngster, I devoured books until my eyes grew hazy. When my exams arrived, I demonstrated the endurance of a monk, studying for hours without a break. But in recent years, I’ve watched that ability for intense focus fade into endless scrolling on my phone. My focus now shrinks like a snail at the tap of a thumb. Engaging with books for pleasure seems less like sustenance and more like endurance training. And for a person who creates content for a living, this is a professional hazard as well as something that made me sad. I aimed to regain that mental elasticity, to stop the mental decline.

Therefore, about a year ago, I made a small promise: every time I came across a term I didn’t know – whether in a book, an article, or an casual discussion – I would research it and record it. Not a thing fancy, no leather-bound journal or stylish pen. Just a running list maintained, amusingly, on my smartphone. Each seven days, I’d devote a few minutes reviewing the list back in an effort to imprint the vocabulary into my memory.

The record now spans almost twenty sheets, and this tiny habit has been quietly life-changing. The benefit is less about peacocking with obscure adjectives – which, to be honest, can make you appear unbearable – and more about the mental calisthenics of the practice. Each time I search for and record a word, I feel a slight stretch, as though some underused part of my mind is flexing again. Even if I never deploy “eidolon” in dialogue, the very process of spotting, documenting and revising it breaks the slide into passive, superficial focus.

Additionally, there's a diary-keeping element to it – it acts as something of a journal, a log of where I’ve been engaging, what I’ve been pondering and who I’ve been hearing.

It's not as if it’s an easy habit to maintain. It is frequently extremely inconvenient. If I’m engaged on the subway, I have to stop mid-paragraph, take out my phone and enter “millennialism” into my Google doc while trying not to elbow the person pressed against me. It can slow my pace to a maddening crawl. (The e-reader, with its built-in lexicon, is much easier). And then there’s the revising (which I frequently neglect to do), conscientiously scrolling through my expanding word-hoard like I’m studying for a vocabulary test.

Realistically, I integrate maybe 5% of these words into my everyday speech. “unreformable” made the cut. “Lugubrious” too. But the majority of them stay like exhibits – admired and listed but rarely used.

Still, it’s made my thinking much sharper. I notice I'm turning less often for the same tired selection of adjectives, and more often for something precise and muscular. Few things are more gratifying than discovering the perfect term you were searching for – like locating the lost component that locks the picture into position.

At a time when our gadgets drain our focus with relentless effectiveness, it feels subversive to use mine as a instrument for slow thinking. And it has restored to me something I worried I’d forfeited – the joy of engaging a intellect that, after years of lazy browsing, is at last stirring again.