How to Eat an Elephant

On the fear of missing out.

The Reading by Édouard Manet (1865-1873)

 Hay Festival organisers take a page out of the Stasi playbook.

Security guards at this premier literary festival practise an endearing, socially hygienic authoritarianism. They rifle through one’s bag. Suppose they discover contraband—fentanyl, anything uttered by James O’Brien, or a Kindle. The first two are forgivable misdemeanours. The Kindle is a high crime.

If, after rooting around one’s cavities, they extract an e-reader from one’s behind, the guards frogmarch the offender to the stocks. There’s no trial and no time to waste. Here, civilised festivalgoers bounce putrid vegetables off the witch-like faces of the condemned. We scream thoughtful, witty obscenities at them. It’s good, socially adhesive fun.

Often, the subversives openly confess their pixellated perversion. ‘It’s so convenient!’ they mewl as we pelt them in the chops with fancy, heirloom tomatoes. ‘I can take a thousand books on my trip to Tuscany!’ plead the undesirables. The worst part? They look just like you and me. This cruel, unusual, and wholly necessary punishment would make the Stasi Zersetzung proud.

Perhaps I’m confusing phantasy with reality.

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As you might have guessed, I’m not partial to Kindles. Neither is the book world. But the book world plays pretend. The book world tolerates the Kindle like a reluctant cuckold tolerates the voracious appetites of his wife’s latest Tinder date.  

John Stuart Mill said liberal cultures would have to embrace illiberal methods now and then to keep the wolves from the door. Thankfully, e-readers have fallen behind paper books. No improper surgery necessary. But the banality of evil has many guises.

According to marketers, those purveyors of piffle, the audiobook is the latest threat to the humble, permanently ‘dying’ book.

In their lingo, the audiobook is trending, surging, sending, or turging. ‘It’s so much easier!’ they claim. ‘You can read War and Peace whilst doing the laundry! Apparently, we’ve been doing it wrong since the printing press first emerged in the 1400s. Books don’t need to be read.

Advocates contend starchy extremists like me are wrong to turn up our noses at the audiobook. They say ancient humans passed knowledge by mouth. The audiobook, they say, returns us to the prelapsarian idyll. The ancients also ripped out the still-beating hearts of their children in the vain hope Baal would kindly piss on their crops.

Through clenched teeth, I forcibly confess audiobooks have their uses. Torture being one of them. More conventionally, though, they’re a lifeline for those with difficulties reading or concentrating and those with particular mental or physical complaints.

Audiobooks are preferable to the millions of monthly hours drained on the Chinese cultural bleaching tub called TikTok. And they may be a gateway drug to reading itself.

However, studies show that listening to an audiobook is inferior to reading a book. It goes in one ear and out the other. The temptation to multitask renders the audiobook little more than a paltry soundtrack. If you’re doing the laundry, play some music.

Indeed, researchers found that reading a paper book was far more effective than reading the same text on an e-reader.  

Audiobooks kid the listener into a bout of busyness. Who in their right mind sits there and intently listens to an audiobook? Few, I would imagine. Audiobooks, then, are a symptom of our box-ticking cult of productivity.

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During a recent trip to Sevilla, I upset an influencer. With a Tinto de Verano in one hand and a Cruzcampo in the other, I shuffled into his shot. The poor mite had tasked himself with snapping every worthy landmark in just a handful of hours, from which my negligence had dissolved vital seconds.

Technically, that lad had visited Sevilla. His Instagram may prove so. Doubtless, he’s performed the same one-footed waltz across Every European City You Have to Visit. But did he visit? If an influencer takes a selfie, but there’s nobody around to like it, did he take a selfie?

No doubt, he had a virulent case of that modern affliction: the Fear of Missing Out. This box-ticking disease is everywhere one looks. At concerts, out are the lighters, and in are the smartphones recording footage nobody will ever willingly watch. At every major landmark in every major city, swarms of standardised faces jostle for selfies. We’d rather prove we were present than be present. We’d rather be seen than see. Ironically, by fearing we’ll miss out, we miss out.

Like most members of the praise-addled self-esteem generation, I’ve struggled with the twin hydras of productivity and perfectionism.

I’ve read books with titles like ‘Get It Done!’ and ‘How to Eat an Elephant,’ the covers of which are splashed with a psychotic American sporting impossibly white teeth. Nothing worked. The more I streamlined and perfected, the more time I wasted.

Recently, I read an old-school writing manual that lamented the rise of the personal computer. These machines, it argued, severed the link between the brain and the page.

Some modern writers swear by this advice. They write by hand and type up later drafts on a typewriter or laptop. The key? They do their thinking on paper.

Like a 1970s throwback, I’m writing this essay by hand. How satisfying the slowness, the inefficiency, the sheer insulting pleasure of doing something slower than it can be done. It’s a small, defiant act in this age of box-ticking busyness. And a luxury I thought I could ill afford.

Writing longhand is glacial. A draft takes two to three times longer than blasting it on the laptop. Surely, that’s a fatal statistic? No. Writing by hand produces deeper, more thoughtful, more layered work in the same or less time than pecking away at a keyboard. You’re forced to think about every word lest your hand cease into a claw. A longhand first draft feels like the third or fourth.

Buried under our relentless culture of efficiency and perfection was the answer I’d long sought. Finally, the tortoise has beaten the hare.          

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That revelation opened my eyes. No, I’m not shacking up in the woods and mailing homemade bombs to tech giants, forestry commissioners, and corporate CEOs. Instead, I’ve dumbed down my phone. An app told me I spent around six hours daily—a working week—scrolling through nonsense, consumed by the fear of missing out.

Those numbers may sound extreme. They’re typical. The average Brit or American spends 31 hours on their phone weekly. Over a lifetime, that’s 20 years.

After deleting all those face-hugging apps, something weird happened. My memory returned, and my brain fog cleared. My chronic case of FOMO ebbed away, too.

Nowadays, I ‘go on the internet.’ Nineteen-nineties kids will understand. Remember when we’d remove ourselves from the real world to spend an hour or two on the Internet? Then, we’d return to the real world. Seneca said life is not too short but that we waste much of it. Seneca didn’t have social media or Wi-Fi.

Anyway, I’ve stolen back 20 hours every week. But I still cringe at those six hours a day I drained ballooning the bank accounts of tech titans.

An average reader reading at 250 words per minute could read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in twelve hours. Perhaps you like to take your time. At 150 words per minute, you’d read in 20 hours a novel many say they’d read if only they had the time.

Perhaps you’re not the biggest reader. That’s understandable. The modern world makes it impossible to do anything without constant distraction. What would you do with a spare twenty hours per week?

I’ll admit, I would read Anna Karenina. But here is the modern problem. If someone reads a book but doesn’t post about it on social media, did they really read the book?

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