Nowadays I do not consume much fiction.

There is a negative correlation between the frequency of my use of the English language and my rate of reading fictional works. Many reasons can help illustrate the interdependency, but most notable among them are my regimented pickup of English as a foreign language in contrast with my poignant education of Vietnamese literature. With Vietnamese fiction I am given beauty, culture, subtlety, cadence, and levity. These components are all available to me in the copious atheneum of the Western canon: I only have enough tools to appreciate it when such enjoyment comes at a time cost. In college, I retrieved from the humanities as sort of a visceral response to my very literary K-12 education. The drive for an idealized epistemic efficiency allowed me to digest dense scientific writing with better agility, in doing so demarcating my use of my two languages more distinctly than ever.

It is not necessarily a bad thing. There are many realms of imagination that once engrossed my mind, but the tides of contemporary ambitions have impelled me to choose a socioeconomic-environmental reality as my domain of life-long work. Fiction was never a coping mechanism; when I consume it, it is out of a fondled curiosity, at times infatuation, that happens to erase an awareness of the material world for just a bit. In the same vein, I cannot read novels if I find myself preoccupied with duties. I want to give the text the adequate level of respect, letting it traverse the mental space that expands unto itself so I can be as enriched as its content permits.

Since starting my professional career, I have found it surprisingly easy to balance between work and life. I owe it to my colleagues, whose amiability has nurtured a healthy working milieu, while I have the gym, a research project, and competitive gaming to fill up my night-time. The conundrum is in balancing between the digital and physical space. I am a chronic denizen of social media; even without that, I seem to crave knowledge of the interlinked WWW and the affection of dearest family and friends, none of whom live remotely close to where I reside. It is so easy now to get updated, connected, or entertained by the lives of others that I would never rationally give that comfort up.

I visited the biggest book store in Santa Cruz a month ago. I bought three things: a used copy of The Opposite of Loneliness, a discounted book on Bernie Sanders’ activism, and a wild-card pick of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun. Technically that was my second visit. My first was unsuccessful: I was on a time crunch, and without the right questions asked I could not force myself to pick a random book in the autobiography section to purchase (I had told my friends I wanted to read more biographies). I wanted to re-trace the familiar activities that seemed to have escaped my mind as I grew out of childlike proclivities. My dad used to let me roam the bookstores of Đinh Lễ Street, stacking volumes of miscellaneous genres in the compartment of his motorbike. My book hauls never had a budget, with the condition that I would keep my bookcase organized at all times (I did not). When we moved to our new house, my parents purchased two more book cases to also make room for the standardized testing practice books. I moved the locus of my book ventures to Bà Triệu Street, yet with just as much glee whenever I had the chance to go.

In third grade I started bringing books into the bathroom and making a small stack on the toilet shelf; over time, that turned into bringing my laptop, and now my phone. I lost connection with curated selection of words and opted to default to a bombardment of entertaining yet low-value tweets. This comment on Tyler Cowen’s blog puts it well: “[the availability of the internet] exacerbates the worst tendencies of western capitalist individualism: anomie, atomisation, and individualistic hedonism.” (Thanks Joon for this). Practically I need to reduce my screen time, but on a more fundamental level I need to re-evaluate the relationship I have with virtual reality, truth-seeking, and what it means to keep myself busy. It would be unfathomable for me to become a luddite. I do not really take the unplugged movement that seriously, nor do I believe in most of self-help literature. But I do seek to emulate the joy of reading in a way that momentarily isolates myself from worrying about the next big thing, and slows the dizzying speed of my thoughts.

Maybe the answer is not fiction, but I want to give it another try.