About an hour into that, pouring sweat, he stops cold and says "what the hell am I doing?" The flooded camp was actually nice on a hot day and all we really had to do was move a couple of tents. He dropped the shovel and spent the rest of the week sunbathing, fishing, snorkeling and water skiing as God intended. He flipped a switch and went from Hyde to Jekyll on vacation. I've had to emulate that a few times.

Many years ago, I had a technical manager who never felt any pressure to be the first to come up with the answer to a question or the solution to some problem. If I was having a technical conversation with him, and we arrived at a particularly subtle or complex issue, he could go completely silent, just staring straight ahead with his fingers to his lips. I would find it very uncomfortable, and I would start blurting out half-baked ideas to fill the silence, but he would either raise his finger or (usually) just ignore me. This could go on for 30-60 seconds, at which point he might shrug and say "I don't know" or, more likely, have a pretty well formed idea of how to move ahead.

I used to joke to my co-workers that during those silent interludes, he was swapping in the solution from a remote disk.

This manager also typed with one or two fingers, and pretty slowly too. But he wrote a lot of good code.

I have always had the intuition about reading speed that it is very easy to be a speed reader if you skim over things. I've always questioned how much of speed reading is just skipping stuff and filtering for the most important word tokens.

You could skip all of Tolkien's scenery descriptions, you could skip Tom Bombadil and Lothlorien and still know basically what happened to Frodo and where he's going. But that's not really the point. When I read a book of that much importance, I've always read every word and understood every sentence. I get easily distracted and often have to reread passages. I am not a fast reader. Tolkien's descriptions are not always that easy. But this is what I find so rewarding about reading in the first place.

However, when I'm reading an article online, the difference is stark. When I read articles, I usually start from the bottom and read backwards. That's my way of finding out the results, and then piecing together how much context I actually need to understand it. Maybe I should slow that down sometimes.

As always, there are tradeoffs, and you can't walk everywhere or always have these types of mindful experiences. On the other hand, life is short and perhaps paradoxically, slower experiences can yield richer days.

There was a man who was afraid of his shadow and disliked his footprints. So he tried to get away from them. He ran, but the faster he ran, the more numerous his footprints became, and his shadow kept up with him without lagging behind. Thinking he was going too slowly, he ran faster and faster, until he collapsed and died of exhaustion. He did not realize that if he had simply stayed in the shade, his shadow would have disappeared, and if he had sat still, there would have been no footprints.

And another one [0]:

My hut lies in the middle of a dense forest; Every year the green ivy grows longer. No news of the affairs of men, Only the occasional song of a woodcutter. The sun shines and I mend my robe; When the moon comes out I read Buddhist poems. I have nothing to report, my friends. If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.

[0] https://firstknownwhenlost.blogspot.com/2011/06/stop-chasing...

And similar to the point OP made, you get more out of it when you attend more closely. And similarly, most music does not withstand this level of scrutiny.

This post resonates strongly with me. I strongly believe the default settings _are_ too high, and it takes conscious effort to slow down while bound to the shackles of modern society, but it's so worth it.

In fact, I noticed that whenever a book becomes most exciting, I start reading especially fast (to the point of skipping words), because I want to know what happens next. So I spend the least time with the best parts of the best books.

Ever since I realized that, I have switched pretty much exclusively to audiobooks. I don't really know if it's faster or slower overall, but it's a predetermined pace, and that works better for me.

Sadly, for some reason I now can't read slowly, which pisses me off. I and my partner read aloud together alternating chapters of a chosen book, and I love how get _much_ more out of the book than I would reading alone in a tenth of the time.

I've also found that some books seem written to be read aloud: the sentence structure and punctuation lends itself to easy reading aloud, whereas some books have really convoluted sentences with multiple parenthetical sub-clauses that are a real challenge to read aloud in an a way that's easy to follow. I've ended up so that normally try to write in a way that's easy to read aloud. I think if something's easy to read aloud it's going to be easy to comprehend when read normally. And Yes, I know that the sentence at the beginning of the paragraph probably doesn't match that.

0: (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/festina%20lente)

The title failed to inspire but I heard it was worth the read and stepped through line by line.

It hit with a depth that I know with complete certainty I would not have gotten if I worked through at my usual pace or took it in as an audiobook.

Nassim Taleb’s books are also favorite slow reads of mine.

All this said, I collect books faster than I can read them so there’s always a feeling somewhere that I should be pushing through a little faster.

Ah well, in the end I think that really comprehending a handful of quality books is about as good as a shallow comprehension of many more.

There are words you don't know or know how to use them properly. It will help you learn the second language better, while also helping you to not gloss over whole passages.

This worked for me... for a time. And then what happened surprised me (but maybe shouldn't have): I started zoning out and thinking about other things, missing important details, while reading aloud. Wild that we can even do that.

I wonder if this contributes to a good chunk of the experience of fine dining. When you get served expensive food in micro-portions that are accompanied by long explanations, you don't gobble it down but take as much time as possible to savour it.

So the main learning is to be aware of the speed settings, and then consider putting ourselves in situations where we can alter them. Faster or slower isn't better in a vacuum. Expermiment and find what's right for you, or, in communication, for your audience.

    It might sound like I’m just offering clichés – less is more, stop and smell the roses, take your time – and I guess I am. But clichés suffer the same issue: they are often profound insights, consumed and passed on too rapidly for their real meaning to register anymore. You really should stop and smell roses, as you know if you’re in the habit of doing that.

This is true for Tolkien, Turgenev, Hemingway or Pound. The amount of information per page—per word!—is incredibly high, which permits the conveyance of ideas which simply do not land when spoken more plainly.

You don’t need to go to high literature to find this density, by the way. Political speeches from Republican Rome and America’s Founders have a similar aspect to them.

Really enjoyed the part talking about Tolkien. It reminds me of my own LOTR experience: I finished the trilogy in three consecutive summers in the hilly countryside of Italy near Rome. The first summer I made it through the fellowship of the ring with a lot of patience and trying for the slower moving parts. The summer after that I started over and read book 1 and 2, and in year three I felt I was finally in sync with the pace of the book and enjoyed reading through book 1, 2, and 3 in a few weeks.

It is quite amazing how many people do not know that there is a multitude of reading techniques to be used with various kinds of texts. You need to use a right tool for the job. Tolkien’s passages describing the Middle Earths ecological landscape are particularly rich calling for careful reading and lingual analysis. I believe he uses almost sole old Celtic words in those passages, avoiding any newer latin-based words more familiar to a modern reader, which cannot be a coincidence.

[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46452/to-an-athlete-d... [2] https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you

Most books are the other way. Zoom through and you can get most of the value. This is especially true of non-fiction, where most have a message that can be gleaned in 15 minutes. (The exceptions are the great ones)

Podcasts are similar. Most give you 80% of the value at 2X speed. Even my favorites - I’d rather speed listen to get 80% the value rather than get 100% of half the backlog. The best podcasts defy this too.

So in the end it’s a bit of a skill to both choose the right things to slow down on, and then a discipline to force the appropriate speed.

It is also possible to walk at incredible low speeds. Some times, I try to force myself to walk as slowly as I dear. It is hard to walk slow in a city full of people. It feels silly. However, it feels great once you've actually slowed down.

That's not always the case. With certain types of food, it's much more enjoyable to have your mouth full than to eat a small amount, for example. It's a trade-off.

It's the same with a story. Taking too long can make it boring, for example.

That doesn't mean we always choose the optimal balance, though.

Tolkien recorded some passages of LoTR on a friend's tape recorder while it was still unpublished, I'd highly recommend checking them outz particularly the Ride of the Rohirrim.

I find this approach rewarding across most forms of media. There plenty of movies and music I’ve revisited over and over again.

The title would make more sense as the default settings being "too low" since Low is the setting where when we trade off fidelity for speed, but "too high" has a nice ring to it.

At first, I found writing code with Claude Code to be enjoyable, while Codex seemed boring. But over time, I've discovered that I actually prefer Codex. Perhaps slowing down really is the key to writing high-quality code.

Reminds me of this speech by Leon Wieseltier.

The author just scratches the surface.

I've been reading the Wheel of Time (started by Robert Jordan, ended by Brandon Sanderson). I'm on book 11 currently. I've found something similar in that the Jordan's later books in the WOT are basically just incredible slogs if you read for completion (which, I myself did around 20 years ago at around book 10, where I stopped). Around book 6 or so I purposely slowed down and started really imagine the scenes in my minds eye. I also keep the map open on my phone and just kind of keep note of where they are at different points in the series.

Obvious, but it is really striking how much better his books are when you try to "live in the moment" of your imagination as you read, rather than reading to move the plot and action forward. I was kind of confused with myself when I reflected on it. That I somehow thought it made more sense to skim through an entire series and take reduced pleasure from something, when I could just take 50% longer and actually enjoy it.

Made me wonder about where else I am doing this in my life.

I still thinks these books are radically overpadded. He was clearly in love with his characters and his setting. He needed the guidance of a strong armed editor imho. With all that said, if you are going to commit to reading a massive series like this, you might as well appreciate it in the moment, you are going to be here a while.

I came here to say "I hope that you are recording yourself so that you create your OWN audiobook"