The hard book was teaching me how to think slowly

I used to think that struggling to get through a dense page meant I wasn't a good reader.

When an article flowed easily, I felt smart; when I had to re-read a paragraph three times, I felt defeated. But reading digitally trains our brains to skim and dart to conclusions, weakening our contemplative capacities. We are evolutionary beings who naturally default to mental processes that require the least computational effort—the classic cognitive miser.

The turning point came when I learned about the fluency illusion—the trap where smooth processing tricks us into believing we have achieved genuine mastery. Familiarity is not understanding. When we rely solely on skimming or easy texts, we experience an illusion of competence that vanishes when we actually need to use the information.