Wisdom and knowledge come from life experience while information gathering comes from multiple other sources, but the best version is reading. Actual full books. People who are "well read" are more interesting to talk to and have a much broader range of depth than those who never read anything. There has been a loss of reading skills in recent decades and a decline in the creation of classical literature.
Many people in modernity won't even read this insight in written form off them members section of our website, or a magazine article, or a fluffy fun book, or a book of fiction, or a book of nonfiction, let alone a more knowledgeable dense book such as an older text or even modern philosophical leaning text. Which is part of numerous reasons why the comedy Idiocracy has become a documentary because we're so often programmed to move a mile a minute over being grounded and centered and still. Reading takes time and requires one to slow down. Ask most people off the street how many books they read in a year and you'd be lucky to find any that say, if not zero, more than a low single digit number. Not only is traditional reading a time investment, involving your full attention, it's also hard on the eyes. Listening is not necessarily the same. When listening, you can also do something else visual.
While cold hardware technologies absolutely have their downsides, and smartphones have had so much damage through their attention sucking, time wasting, and anxiety producing feeds, at the same time they have put multiple wonderful tools in most of our pockets. Such as digital maps and another being their audio listening capabilities. Audiobooks offer a unique combination of convenience, accessibility, and immersive storytelling. Whether for relaxation, learning, or entertainment, audiobooks are an excellent alternative or complement to traditional reading. You may feel the same, but either at home or on the move, if we're alone and don’t have headphones in our ear holes, it feels as though something is missing. Leaving the house without the trifecta of the wallet, keys, and phone with earbuds causes sensations of being partially nude.
Time is valuable and life is short. Our time to ourselves is best spent taking in healthy and good tasting information via audiobook or yummy educational podcast, while perhaps also getting some other tasks done at the same time. You can always have earbuds in your ears listening whenever you're by yourself in your spare time. And if you choose to make those audiobooks over other mediums you can read a
book or two a month. Reading through your ears while out and about, commuting, operating some sort of motor vehicle, getting chores done, exercising, working in the yard, doing various hobbies, not to mention their amazing benefits for helping to improve listening skills, enhance vocabulary, reducing reading anxiety, and make literature accessible to other language learners, of those with visual or learning challenges.
As someone who is mildly dyslexic, reading has been a lifelong struggle for this writer. The McDonalds for the mind B+ level accurate Wikipedia definition of dyslexia is "difficulty in learning to read or interpret words". Which sure as shit was true here in this brain’s real estate. When going through our 12 years of the mind control conform boot camp of public school, even though we were appreciative to go to good public schools, (balance of capital and social) we would have so much problem not remembering what we had just gone over a few paragraph's before. This mainly popped up when reading fiction whereas we would often be lost in place and time within the story, making it difficult to always know when and where we were in the narrative. However, it wasn't so much the information in the text itself but more the process of extracting the details of that info off the page and into memory. It felt analogous to gears turning over slow in the mental cogs. However, being read that very same text out loud was a different story. And because of the lack of audiobooks available in our high school years in the 1990's, we eventually came to discover another audio reading technology, which has not only made us a better reader, but also a better writer, which is a secret weapon which we'll get into in the next one.