Bear with me. This may come off sounding a little convoluted. But there’s a point and I’ll get to it eventually. Today’s joint Words of the Day (WOTD) are “FOMO” and “OG.” Which are acronyms that stand for “Fear of Missing Out” and “Original Gangster,” respectively. What the…? Like I said, bear with me. It will all come clear by the end. Hopefully it will be worth the wait. But remember: The joy is in the journey. I think maybe I read that in a blog somewhere?
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This here is a blog, right? And that would make me, for lack of a better term, a blogger. So imagine my consternation yesterday upon receiving in my inbox the following email from my Alma Mater, specifically from the editor of my University’s Alumni Magazine, announcing the online release of their Winter 2024 issue.
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| Blogs, remember those? So evanescent, so bygone, so early two-thousands. However. Something I read on a lit blog 20 years ago has me preoccupied and galvanized in this young year. |
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| A commenter responding to some post that’s itself lost to memory reckoned that her average reading pace was two books a month. She punched that average, her age, and her life expectancy into a calculator. The number it spat out was 520, the number if books she still had time to read. |
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| Yikes. That few? At the time I was quite a bit younger than the commenter, with a good chance to read more than that. Still, her number haunted me, stark and finite. Whatever my number, it was certainly also finite. I needed to get in gear and start devouring books by the stack. |
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| Alas, the reality over these two decades has been that I find myself reading less, not more. Reader, it pains and shames me to admit that the book habit, once one of the very ways I defined myself, has been, more and more, not my habit. |
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| How could this be? Once upon a time, I was an English graduate student. Before that a junior book editor. Once upon a time, I had a younger person’s eyesight. Once upon a time, I commuted by train for many blissfully solitary minutes a day. Hardest of all to own up to: I didn’t have a smartphone stocked with ready distractions. |
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| Thus, a New Year’s resolution. Though I have never been a resolutions person, for all of the standard reasons: Arbitrary. Predictable. Disingenuous. Self-punishing. Reading more books seems to skirt those categories. Plus it’s fun. My goal is one a week. With slim tomes heavily represented. |
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| January brought The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Call for the Dead by John le Carré (out of their intended order). Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (taut and bleak). And now Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire (good, but no Transit of Venus). A friend who is a resolutions person has advised that the key is to keep going even when I fall off the pace. So far, so good. As you delve into the newly available Winter/24 University of Chicago Magazine, happy reading from a happy reader. |
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| And if you’ve ever made a New Year’s resolution of the literary kind, tell us about it at [email protected]. |
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| Best wishes, |
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| Laura Demanski, AM’94 |
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“So evanescent, so bygone, so early two-thousands?” What the…? I guess for me, Old Gangster that I am, “early 2000’s” is actually pretty up-to-date. C’mon, I was already 42 years old way back in 2000, so I’m no spring chicken – then or now.
As for the pace of my reading addiction? Well, let’s just say that one book a week is plenty ambitious, let alone two. Hell, my wife usually reads ten different books at once. But that’s another post for another day. I guess the bottom line for me is that some people have much more FOMO than others. More power to ’em, I say. Oh, and also this: RELAX, guys!
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The deeper point lurking in the substrata under all the angsty FOMO is this: Beware the Casual Myopia of the Relatively Recent. That is to say, when looking backwards over time, stuff that happened yesterday or last week not only looms larger in our rear-view mirror than stuff from the dim mists of the distant past, but it tends to put our eyes a bit out of focus. And that’s not only a shame, it’s dangerous – especially while driving at night – because it skews our vision. And it makes us susceptible to all sorts of short-sighted assumptions.
Do you doubt it? Well, read on if you dare. And try not to run into anything while you’re doing it.
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My grandparents were born in a time before radio. My parents were born in a time before TV. And I was born before the Internet came to be. So, when a thirty-or-forty-something alumni-magazine editor says “Blogging is passé,” I say: “So what?” Hey, we weren’t born yesterday, sister. Best to get over our Casual Myopia of the Relatively Recent and expand our horizons to include the Big Tent. And that, dear Editor, includes OG-bloggers, like me.
Or, to cite another example: There was a time when paper newsprint was a revolutionary innovation. Think Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” and Ben Franklin’s “Poor Richard’s Almanac.” Or hell, go even further back and think Johannes Guttenberg’s printing press and the King James Bible for that matter.
There was also once a time when Walter Cronkite and Huntley-Brinkley were the sole sources of evening news in most American living rooms. Nowadays, we pick our news sources off a drop-down menu according to our pre-existing biases. And whether that’s an advance or a regression I leave it to you to determine.
But my main point is this: Technology marches onward without waiting for any of us to keep pace. Is it any wonder that Instagram and TikTok and YouTube have supplanted older forms of infotainment? That doesn’t mean reading hard-copy books or news flies out the window, any more than it means that blogging is passé. It just means we now have a bigger menu to choose from. And more noise to contend with.
The only constant is change, and the pace is picking up. But also, at the same time, be careful to watch out for the Casual Myopia of the Relatively Recent. Because there can be more than one obstacle at any single time in our forward-leaning path to the bright future: Word to the wise; ignore it at your peril.
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As for FOMO? Um, sorry, can’t help you with that one. Maybe try some old-school therapy? Hey, take it from an OG-psychotherapist and blogger like me: In the grand scheme of things, it probably wouldn’t hurt.
