ege's weblog

read-it-never

What’s the point of putting things into my read-it-later app?

Actually, I know the point: it gives me a false sense of accomplishment. I now have this essay in my possession. It makes me feel good about myself immediately—without doing the thing.

Even though I wrote a somewhat negative review of Erich Fromm’s To Have or to Be? it made me remember a crucial insight about knowledge. If my relationship with knowledge is to hoard information, I’ve missed the whole point. I need to bend, squeeze, and transform knowledge and get bent, squeezed, and transformed in return. Having hundreds of articles in my read-it-later app doesn’t really yield anything. I’d rather read a few.

I canceled my subscription to Readwise Reader. It’s not that the app was bad. I just had an unhealthy relationship with it. I had almost 700 articles saved on it and I knew I was never going to read all of them. I was basically paying 9 dollars a month for Readwise to carry deadweight.

I feel lighter.

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