For a long time after I got married, I used to have this vague idea that the purpose of marriage was for each partner to fill in what the other lacked. Lately though, after 25 years of marriage, I’ve come to see it differently, that marriage is perhaps rather an ongoing process of each partner’s exposing of what the other lacks….Finally, only the person himself can fill in what he is missing. It’s not something another person can do for you. And in order to do the filling in, you yourself have to discover the size and location of the hole.

—Haruki Murakami via Austin Kleon

Margaret Renkl finds a solution for dealing with our times that is much like Austin Kleon’s.

In recent years, I’ve been looking for a solution to this conundrum. How is it possible to be a well-informed citizen and simultaneously a calm, mostly cheerful, more or less sane human being?

The closest thing I’ve found to a workaround is the right dosing. I follow the news during daylight hours. At night, I read a book.

Sometimes it’s a poetry collection I can finish in an evening. Sometimes it’s a memoir or a thick, juicy novel that will carry me through a week or two. Often it’s an essay collection, a genre which comes with those lovely, built-in stopping places that make it easier to close the book and avert a wrestling match with the clock.

Short Books Are Perfect for Our Distracted Age

In brain-scrambling times like these, I like to read old books. I’m currently reading one of Michel de Montaigne’s essays every morning to avoid a.m. doomscrolling. 400 years ago, Montaigne wrote in “On Prognostications” about “the stubborn curiosity of our nature which delights in worrying about the future as if it had not enough to deal with in the present.” He then quotes Lucian: “Let the mind of men be blind to what is to be. May those who fear be permitted to hope.”

Austin Kleon

This makes me wonder why I didn’t think of that. My habit is to write every morning, but that usually makes me think more about the state of affairs these days, just increases the impulse towards doomscrolling.

An advantage of keeping a diary consists in the fact that one becomes aware with reassuring clarity of the transformations one incessantly undergoes…In the diary one finds proof that, even in conditions that today seem unbearable, one lived, looked around and wrote down observations, that this right hand thus moved as it does today…