Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
It’s been more than a month since I left the my university friend’s whatsapp group.
Leaving the group felt weird. I have been friends with them since the university days and we have fun times together. Of course there are times I was quite toxic but we somehow just make things work. This time round, most of us are going through different challenges in life that we are actually drifting apart, especially myself. My tolerance towards unverified news is very low, and as much as I give links and tell people to verify before sending, but that went unheeded.
Recently I saw this article on Medium about a list of books that changed the author’s life. I found two of them really interesting and reading them now. A thought came back to my mind and I realised how much I miss reading for the joy of it.
I love reading when I was young. I love it so much that it is often my distraction from my school homework, especially maths. However that changed when I went into university. The lure of the internet is great and my group of friends are non-readers.
They have uttered statements such as “Wah, you like to blog and share a lot eh?” or “I don’t like to read” or “Reading is boring.”
To be fair, those statements are not malicious. However for the sake of fitting in, I slowly reduce my reading and went for books that are more visual. Visual books helped me in my design career but not abstracts and concepts.
Nine years after I have worked, I decided to pursue my Masters, and that means a lot more reading. Everyone can tell you, “Reading is good for you” but never contextualise it to the normal people. At this point, I am too lazy to analyse and summarise the whole point of reading, but Quartz has a good article about how to read.
Why people in power often burn or ban books? Why people in power often control the nation’s education and politicise it? That is because books are able to gives you perspectives, show you the different truths, and the most dangerous thing of all is we can have differing views and this might not help the government. The more dissenting views the people have, the power of the government will be threatened.
And that’s what happened to my friends and I. The group of friends did not want to verify the news and rather believe whatever it is forwarded. I also realised that I forced myself to fit in that group during my undergraduate days. It took me 15 years to realised that if I don’t fit in, I don’t force it in. I might be happy to have friends, but it is painful to my soul when I could not be myself, which part of myself comes from the love of reading.
And at the meantime, I shall go back to my reading for my actual academics.