Forgetting a book doesn’t mean you wasted your time. What you forget isn’t deleted. The path to it just gets weaker. The details fade, but the way you see things stays. So don’t stop reading long books just because you think you’ll forget them.

There’s a thick book on your shelf. You spent three weeks on it, maybe a month, and some nights it kept you up way later than you planned.

If someone asked what it was about, you’d manage two sentences. On the third, you’d get stuck.

I know this feeling well. There are books I loved that I couldn’t summarize now if you paid me.

That’s frustrating. You gave it a month and got two sentences back, which feels like a bad deal. And it’s easy to end up here: if I forget it all anyway, what’s the point? I’ll just read short stuff.

But that’s the wrong conclusion, because what you forget doesn’t really go away.

What you forget isn’t deleted

In the 1880s, Hermann Ebbinghaus ran an experiment on himself. He memorized lists of short made-up words that meant nothing, waited a long time, and then sat down to learn the same lists again. It felt like he remembered nothing. But he learned them much faster than the first time.

Something was still there. He couldn’t reach it, but it wasn’t gone.

Think of a path through a park that nobody uses anymore. Grass grows over it and the path disappears, but the ground is still there. When you forget a book, you don’t lose the ground. You lose the path.

Remembering everything is worse

In Borges’ story “Funes the Memorious,” a young man falls off a horse. When he wakes up, he can’t forget anything. Every leaf, every cloud, every detail stays with him. And he can’t think, because thinking means letting go of details and seeing what things have in common. For Funes, a dog seen from the side at 3:14 and the same dog seen from the front at 3:15 are two different animals.

So forgetting doesn’t mean reading went wrong. The events fade, and that gives a way of seeing room to stay.

A long book is a place

Short content gives you information. You scroll, you move on, and by tomorrow it’s gone, because you were never really inside it.

A long book is different. You move in. You live with the same voice for weeks, and the book gets mixed into your evenings, a trip, a hard stretch of your life. That’s why length matters. The longer you stay, the deeper the mark.

How do you know?

This all sounds a little too nice, so let’s test it. Saying “that book changed me” is easy. Maybe you just remember liking it.

Don’t look at what’s in the book. Look at yourself. Do you see something differently now? Do you use an idea without remembering where it came from? If you opened the book again, would it come back faster? Look for the mark in what you do, not in what you remember.

So what do you do with this?

Don’t stop reading because you’ll forget.

Don’t judge a book by how much of it you remember. Look at what kind of reader, and what kind of thinker, it made you.

Pick one of the thick books on your shelf and read twenty pages today. Just twenty.

You’ll forget most of it, and that’s fine. Some of it will stay, and you probably won’t notice when it does.

1 hour of reels a day = 6.25% of your waking life. That’s 365 hours a year, 3,650 hours in a decade, and over 2 years of pure screen time across 50.

The brain gets trained on a “bored > instant new stimulus” loop. Real-world rewards come slowly, so patience, attention, and impulse control erode.

The brain doesn’t process what the feed shows as random statistical samples. It processes them as part of the social circle. Normal life starts to feel inadequate.

If the same 1 hour goes into a skill, it compounds. 3,650 hours in a decade. And this return isn’t linear, it changes the value of every hour after it too.

The point isn’t to turn every minute into production. The point is to not surrender a large portion of life to automatic consumption that leaves nothing behind.

Today I want to remind you of a friend you’ve long forgotten: FREE TIME.

Yes! Its name is free time. All of us used to have free time, right?

What did we do in that free time? We read books, went for walks, folded origami, went on picnics, discovered new places, met new people, tried new tastes. But most importantly, we thought. We used our ability to think. Because in free time, when boredom hit, we had to think, so we stayed alone with our own minds, questioned ourselves, questioned life, found things to do, set sail for new journeys. We lived life to the fullest.

Did you notice? I keep using past tense. Because all of it is in the past.

Have you had any free time in the last year? Let’s think about it. No, right?

Because our free time got replaced by other things.

When was the last time you traveled without headphones? When was the last time you got in the car without turning on music? When was the last time you took a walk without a podcast, or actually chose to think in an empty moment?

You didn’t. Because every empty moment got filled with something else.

Instagram reels, TikTok videos, YouTube shorts...

Yes. All of us have gotten to know these more closely than almost anything else in our lives. To the point where they’re almost a part of our lif- or should I have said the whole of it?

These days everyone has a phone, a tablet, a computer, at least one piece of tech. Even a 3-year-old. Some people are even scrolling while walking down the street :((

Every empty moment, filled

We spend every empty moment of life scrolling, listening to music or podcasts, watching video, squeezing something in between everything else. Every second of it. Because we do this constantly, more and more, more and more, the brain now reads it as safe.

And it’s not just you doing it, everyone around you is doing it. In a world where everyone does it, forget analyzing whether it’s harmful, it doesn’t even cross your mind. The person next to you at a friend gathering is scrolling. In cafes, airports, hotels. A friend sends you a reels DM. Etc.

Average daily use is up to 5 hours. Forget 5 hours, let’s take a closer look at what happens with just 1 hour a day.

Now let’s do some basic math

Assume 8 hours of sleep. That leaves 16 waking hours.

1 hour / 16 hours = 6.25% of your waking life.

Another way to put it: 1 out of every 16 waking minutes goes to reels.

1 hour a day is 365 hours a year. Multiplied by 5 that’s 1,825 hours. In 10 years, 3,650 hours. In 50, 18,250 hours.

18,250 hours = 760 days = 2.08 years.

So 50 years of scrolling 1 hour a day equals spending over 2 full years staring at a screen 24 hours nonstop. Do you know what that means?

You get one shot at life, and you’re giving over 2 years of it to just scrolling. (And that’s only at 1 hour of reels a day.)

Alright, that’s just the time part

Beyond the time itself, this waste hits the body, the brain, and the mind. In other words, it also affects the other 15 hours outside that 1 hour. In other words, it hits YOUR LIFE.

When 1 hour of reels is watched, it isn’t just 60 minutes lost. The brain gets trained into a specific mode of consumption and, plainly, numbed.

Scroll > new stimulus > scroll > something more interesting > scroll > funny > scroll > attractive face > scroll > outrage > scroll > news > scroll...

If each video is 20 seconds, then 1 hour = 180 videos. That’s 65,700 videos a year. And 657K short videos in a decade.

Each video is a different person, a different voice, a different context, a different feeling.

This “bored > instant new stimulus” loop, repeated hundreds of thousands of times, has the potential to change what the rest of life registers as normal and what it registers as safe. You know the brain codes whatever it does repeatedly as safe.

And in every task in life, the moment boredom hits, the hand goes to the phone automatically, gets pulled into reels. Attention and impulse control disappear. The tasks that need doing don’t get done.

Let’s move past this. Onto the motivation side.

Almost none of the big rewards in real life come fast.

Start a company > results in months.

Learn English > fluency in months.

Do sports > body changes in months.

Read a book > maybe not a single “wow” moment for 30 minutes.

Solve a problem > 2 hours of finding nothing, then the answer.

Reels is the exact opposite:

5 seconds > reward.

10 seconds > reward.

Bored > swipe.

Didn’t like it > swipe.

So without realizing it, a person can teach themselves this behavior:

“If something isn’t immediately interesting, drop it.”

Whereas most things that require success require the opposite:

“Even if it isn’t interesting right now, keep going.”

The two behaviors are nearly polar opposites.

The math gets more brutal on the success side

Think about two people, each with a choice.

Person A: 1 hour of scrolling a day.

Person B: puts that 1 hour into a single skill.

A year later:

B has practiced for 365 hours.

5 years, 1,825 hours.

10 years, 3,650 hours.

You don’t even need a magic number like the “10,000 hour rule” here. 3,650 hours is enough to create a terrifyingly large gap between two people working on the same thing.

One of them ends up looking “so talented.” The truth sometimes is:

One invested 6% of their life in production.

The other invested that same 6% in consumption.

The invisible social opportunity cost

If just half of that 1 hour went into human relationships instead of social media:

30 minutes × 365 = 182.5 hours a year. In 10 years, 1,825 hours of real human contact.

Talking to family, spending time with friends, meeting new people, building something together...

Here’s the paradox: a person watching the lives of hundreds of people can end up spending less time with the people in their own life. Social media looks social, but depending on how it’s used, it can be a deeply asocial activity.

The psychological side: the comparison problem

In real life a person might see 20 to 30 people in a day. In an algorithmic feed, in a single hour, these are the kinds of profiles that show up:

+100M raised founder.

Entrepreneur who pulled off their second exit at 23.

2399x YC founder.

SaaS with 0842340234 monthly active users.

Solo GP who just launched their own fund.

Investor networking across 3 continents in a single day.

Ultra super sonic smart Stanford dropout founder.

21-year-old on Forbes 30 under 30.

Founder announcing Series A in front of their Ferrari.

Then the phone locks.

You’re in your room.

Here’s the problem: the brain doesn’t process these profiles as random statistical samples of the world. It processes them as part of the social circle.

When a career gets compared to those founder highlights, a network to “3 continents in a day,” a life to luxury lifestyle content, and intelligence to extraordinary people, normal life starts to look inadequate.

Enough negativity!

Now let’s flip to the positive side.

Imagine taking just 1 hour a day away from reels and giving it to something actually useful.

That’s 365 hours a year. Roughly 46 full workdays.

5 years, 1,825 hours.

10 years, 3,650 hours.

At first glance it just sounds like “you’re doing more stuff.” That’s not the real difference.

Because time you invest in something useful doesn’t disappear. It stacks.

You spend 1 hour today on English. Tomorrow you understand the video you’re watching a little better. A few years later you can talk comfortably with a foreigner. That opens the door to meeting new people, working in other countries, reading more. Your world grows.

You spend 1 hour today on sports. It’s not just that hour of exercise. In the hours after, you’re more energetic. Your body changes, your confidence changes, going out becomes more enjoyable.

You spend 1 hour today reading. It’s not just a few pages of information. What you talk about starts to change. You start understanding people better. You get more curious. When you look at a film, a city, a person, you see things you couldn’t see before.

You spend 1 hour today creating something. Code, writing, a company, art, music, anything. Over time, something in the world starts belonging to you.

And I think this is the most important point

Time spent usefully doesn’t just give you something in the future. It raises the quality of the future time you’ll actually be living.

Say you spent one hour a day investing in yourself for 10 years. 10 years later, it isn’t just 3,650 hours of accumulated work behind you.

You’ll have a brain that knows more.

You’ll communicate better.

You might have a healthier body.

You might know more people.

You might have more moments, more skills, more stories.

You might have more options.

And because of that, the quality of the other 15 hours of your day starts going up too.

So the point isn’t: “I did 1 hour of work instead of 1 hour of reels.”

That one hour, over time, starts changing the rest of your life.

You learned English. Now travel is more enjoyable.

You did sports. Walking, swimming, going out, all more enjoyable.

You invested in your relationships. When you sit down at dinner, there are people you can talk with and laugh with.

You built a skill that pays. You have more freedom.

You grew your curiosity. A museum, a book, a city, a conversation you used to find boring is now interesting.

You built something. You start to feel like you actually have influence over your own life.

Every minute you’re living slowly gets more vivid.

So the difference between two people isn’t just:

Person A watched 3,650 hours of reels in 10 years.

Person B built themselves for 3,650 hours in 10 years.

The real difference is this:

What Person B gained in those 3,650 hours also makes the tens of thousands of other hours better.

That’s why the return on useful time isn’t linear.

You put in 1 hour but the return doesn’t come only from that one hour. It changes the value of every hour after it.

And the reverse matters too

You don’t need to turn life into a nonstop “let me be successful later” productivity project. An hour with friends, a walk, a game, music, thinking, even sitting doing nothing, can be valuable if it’s a moment you’re actually living.

The point isn’t to turn every minute into production.

The point is to not surrender a large portion of life to automatic consumption that leaves almost nothing behind when it’s over.

Because the most beautiful result of well-used time isn’t just becoming more successful.

It’s becoming someone who can enjoy the life they’re living, more.