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Saturday, 11 October 2025

Preter pereo paĝrulado (Beyond doom scrolling)

If you're like me and you're getting worried about skim reading so many articles online that it is having an adverse cognitive effect on things like reading comprehension and retention, maybe consider learning a new language.

I'm just taking baby steps in learning Esperanto (at the equivalent stage of “This is a Janet. Janet is cooking in the kitchen. And this is John. John is in the lounge reading a book.”) and I've noticed that you really have to pore over the text, re-read it, and refer back to it later, numerous times, as the meaning gradually sinks in. It's a totally different, and healthier, experience. Boy, does it slow you down to a sane pace.

A photo showing the head and shoulders of a man facing right, sitting at a polished wooden desk with an open laptop in front of him, phone, notepad and pen to his right, mug to his left. Suffering from burnout, his head is resting on the desk in front of him, and he has his face cupped in his hands.

But don't take my word for it. Author Tahir Shah writes: “the language has always appealed to me – and my father [the writer and thinker, Idries Shah] used to talk about the language. He was a good linguist and so no surprise that he understood Esperanto.”

Homaranismo

And you will perhaps not be surprised to find that L. L. Zamenhof, the guy who laid the foundations for Esperanto, also had a spiritual philosophy, Homaranismo, which he later came to see as a bridge between religions, just as the language was a bridging language, a bridge of words.

Image

Image: Burnout At Work - Occupational Burnout / Microbiz Mag / Wikimedia Commons (orig. Flickr) / CC BY 2.0.

#Esperanto #Homaranismo (Humanism)