On Hyperliteracy
2025-10-21
I spent most of today sleeping. I feel as if I've been crashing and burning a bit, so I decided to sleep for most of today so that I could try and restore myself as much as I could. Yet the urge to keep the streak persisted and here I am, writing another entry. I'm happy to be here, though.
To those who reached out to me after yesterday's entry and cheered me up, I appreciate it very much. You are all loved immensely. I feel as if there's not enough love I can give and I lament the fact that I feel so selfish about it all. But today has been an okay day as I've let myself lull around in bed with my dreams and half-dreams. Rest still feels intangible—being locked inside my head is a torturous thing, but still I persist.
Still, I persist in coming here and checking my sensors and seeing what divine intervention may come in making these entries. Some days it feels prescient—like it's been there all along—but for many it feels like it's just me in here clacking away at my keyboard until something comes out. It's been an odd affair recently because I'll think of an interesting idea to write on and tell myself that when the time comes to write today's Cogito entry that I'll be able to rat off about the Thing On My Mind For That Day. But many times it doesn't come because I lose it in the tempest of my thoughts, so instead I resign myself to write something off the top of my head instead.
I think it's a good practice to do this kind of writing in this space and in this way. It's a form I've only seen a few others do, but for me this writing exists not as a form of documentation, but as one of ephemera. A few hundred words worth of thought for the reader to sample on in a few short minutes whatever time of day it is, but then it fades into the obscurity of the corpus as the reader looks forward to the next sample to indulge on. It's a cool way of doing things.
I think that the age of the book is dying despite the best efforts of publishers large and small. People still read books, of course. I still read them and many of my friends still read them, but I think of people younger than me and wonder how they'll be able to absorb the infinite hose of information that floods them. We talk incessantly about drifting attention spans and how kids these days can only consume information in small bits and pieces. Many of us adults see this as a weakness of the younger generation: "Oh, these kids can't read full books, they're illiterate!" No you silly academic reject, the kids aren't illiterate. They're hyperliterate.
Kids these days read more than any of us ever did in our youth. Even if it's subtitles in videos, they still read and write more than we ever could have back then. Sure, they might be sending swaths of messages on Discord or writing fan fictions, but as old people, it's not cool of us to stand there and yell at the clouds for drifting. The world is extremely different than it was even six or seven years ago, but I'm sick of people telling the same lies we tell every generation—that the kids are getting worse and that our glory days are fading.
To quote Louis Armstrong from What a Wonderful World:
I hear babies crying, I watch them grow
They'll learn much more than I'll ever know
The kids are gonna be alright.
We're all gonna be alright.