Libb

Then, don't hesitate. Do what you really like.

Also, don't be afraid to try new stuff if you feel like those are not enough.

• One cannot can fight an addiction by deciding to do boring or not as exciting stuff. You need to find more exciting/interesting activities outside of the Web, be it on reddit or whatever.
  So, the question boils down to: do you have any passion, hobby, side activity you wish to invest more time in it? Now would be a good time. And if you don't have any, now will the best time to start trying out new activities ;)
  Don't be afraid to try stuff and then to change if you do't enjoy them.
• What may also help you is to realize you have one live to live, with a (very) limited amount of time before it's over. We all have.
  So, do you really want to waste any second of your time reading some bullshit and interacting with assholes or morons (that are proud of their crass ignorance and their constant hatred)?
  I certainly don't, my time is way too precious to waste it with them.

Enjoy spending your time doing positive activities. Things that will help you grow and appreciate life even more. Play music, write, sketch, paint, dance, do a movie, sculpt, or go out for a walk, have a look at whatever nature remains near you... while there is still something to look at. Spend as much time as you can with the people you care about, your spouse and your family maybe? Not with a bunch of hateful and dumber than shit morons.

I am not a US-citizen nor am I a woman (if I was, I would probably be a little too old to need that kind of help) but, very naively I'll admit it, this is really not the kind of guide I would have imagined would become so urgently needed.

It seems a very well made guide, with a lot of very useful suggestions.

Which makes me feel even more sad to realize this is indeed useful and very much needed.

What else?

My only advice would be these two:

1. Don't be afraid or ashamed to start and to not finish a book. It's fine and it's legit. There is no moral obligation on your part as a reader to finish a book you don't enjoy. Just close it and try another one.
2. Don't be afraid to reopen a book you did not like before. We all change. So do our preferences. It's not guaranteed (decades later, and after many repeated attempts, I still do not enjoy reading Marcel Proust) but some of your taste will indeed change with time. A few of the books I cherish today (in my 50s) were among the 'wtf is that thing?' the first time I tried to read them decades ago. Like, really.

What are your reading habits like?

• I read at every single opportunity I have. I never waste my time scrolling on my phone or watching TV (we don't have a TV set). For me, doom scrolling is not even a temptation as I always have a (much more interesting) book with me. And when I don't read and still don't want to 'waste' my time looking at my phone, I will sketch in my pocket notebook instead. No matter where I am.
• I read at any time of the day/evening/night. I have no fix work-schedule (I'm my own boss).
• There are books waiting for me to grab them everywhere at our place. I mean not neatly stored in a bookshelf but lying in places where I will see them (my spouse is OK with that). I just checked, there are four books (one essay, one novel, a children book and a how-to guide) just here on my desk. Plus two dictionaries. And my personal diary which is another book I regularly re-read.
• I always have more than one book started at the same time. So I can change book if I don't feel like reading one in particular.
• When I don't want to read, I don't read. That's not a job. I very much like going out for long walks too and those will often take precedence over reading (but I will have a pocket book and a sketchbook with me, just in case).
• I recently quit reading ebooks almost completely to read printed books (want to know why? check the link to my blog in my profile, there are three posts talking about that choice).
• I always take notes while reading, no matter the type of book. I carry a bunch of A6 index cards within each book and a ballpoint pen. Cards on which i write the page number and a short note/comment/quote. I keep all those notes organized in a box which later helps me easily and quickly go through all what I read to find whatever I am looking for and also often find new ideas while doing so (wanna know more about that card thing? Search what is a Zettelkasten, aka a fancy German word to describe a box with a large stack of somewhat organized but not too organized index cards in it, it's like a second brain, just better).

What do you like to read?

Essays, poetry, novels, phylosophy, history, short stories, sociology,... Younger, I used to read a lot of plays (Racine, Shakespeare, Godot,...). I read in French and in English (starting to read in Spanish too, but I still have a lot to learn). I love all eras, from antiquity to very contemporary works. I like reading children books a lot too, even though I'm 50+ and my spouse and I have no children. Some of those books are pure masterpieces, text as well as illustrations.

The thing that may help you get into reading more (beside not forcing yourself to finish one in particular) is to try to widen your horizon by trying stuff you would not normally read.

Say you like fantasy, ok, try horror instead. Or scifi. Or historical romance. Or essays. And so on. Just keep in mind you're trying it, don't force it if you don't like it. To save money, use your public library: it's probably free ;)

What kind of stage of life are you in, and how does that affect it?

Not sure to understand the question.

50+ I now need glasses to read. Beside that... I still try to read widely and to never let anyone's expectations about what some dude like me (my age, my genre, race, social situation, whatever) is supposed to be reading and enjoying.

Have you made any changes, positive or negative, to your reading habits?

Positive: like I said, recently I quit reading ebooks and went back to good old paper. Zero regret, quite the contrary: I'm more tranquil. Once again, feel free to check my little (and seldom updated) blog if you're curious to know more about that ;)

Negative: I sometimes read less, out of sheer laziness. I always regret it.

I am going to disagree with one item. You say you don’t have a tv. The screen you use to display the image is effectively a tv. So in essence you still have one. You just don’t have cable tv or an aerial antenna. You even use the streaming services from time to time.

Well, technically it is not a tv since it has not the thingy (whatever the technical term is) that makes any TV able to receive a signal and transcode into a meaningful image all by itself. The thing that makes it so you just plug the TV to a cable or an antenna and get some content. Our screen needs to be plugged into a computer to do the work of creating the image the screen is displaying. Here in France, every household is required to pay a tax on the TV sets they own, for many decades, computer screens were not concerned by the tax because they could not do that stuff a TV does, so they were not considered TV.

But I understand what you mean. I was... misleading.

To make myself clearer maybe I should have said that we own screens (more than one, as we both work from home and own more than one computer each) but no TV set and have not owned one since the late 90s, and probably never will again. Edit: we watch stuff on screens, obviously, we just do not watch TV content.

re-edit: typos

Do you watch any streaming services or do you mean zero tv, no shows, nothing?

We do, from time to time. We will subscribe for a month to such or such streaming and watch the few content we're interested in. Most of the time, though, there isn't that many stuff we really want to watch. And if you're wondering, we watch content on simple computer screen (hooked to a Linux machine) that has nothing 'smart' in it — it just displays pixels.

Note that a few years ago, when they all started appearing, we were subscribed to quite a few services and that was fun, at the beginning. Alas, we quickly grew tired of always being fed the same kind of politically correct, highly sanitised, and very... formatted type of content. Like with books, my spouse and I both enjoy challenging content (which includes being confronted to things and thoughts we will deeply disagree with). Don't get me wrong, there are a few very high quality content that is streamed, just not enough to our taste for us to be willing to pay the always more expensive monthly fee they're asking for it.

That said, we own a large DVD collection, which we prefer to streaming because:

• We paid for them once, some 20+ years ago. No lifetime rent.
• In the same logic: nowadays used DVDs are dirt cheap and one could easily build their dream library for almost nothing.
• We're not tracked while watching them.
• We're free to watch whatever we want. It doesn't matter if it is trendy or not, if it's popular or not, if it's decades or a century old. We own it? We can watch it.
• Last but not least, there is no one that can come at our place to modify the DVDs we own. Be it to remove some content that would be considered unacceptable today (or tomorrow), to change or to add something in it, or even to delete the whole DVD. We paid for that plastic disc, we legally own it. Even if the almighty Sony, Warner, HBO, Universal or Whomever changed their mind and wanted to take it back, they can't. Unlike what we have already seen happening more than once with digital content being modified or deleted, or less dramatically but as efficiently as far as censoring goes 'not being available anymore'.

This is also why I quit reading ebooks almost completely, to read printed books again. I don't want anyone to be able to remotely edit or delete a book from my bookshelves (Hi Amazon, please go kindly sit your naked ass on some cactus), nor to feel entitled to look over my shoulder while I'm reading so they could 'data mine' my reading habits.

Wooops, sorry for this lengthy and 'ranty' reply. Hope you won't mind ;)

Even if parties have wildly different objectives or winning conditions, if they didn’t have to compete for the same resources then they could cooperate or at least ignore each other.

I think that ignoring each other is probably the most common thing happening. One can look at wild animals sharing the same living space without fighting (or not, depending if they're prey/predator to one another). Competition and fight happen when there is something disputed between them, bet it one serving as food to the other or some common resources. At least, as far as I understand it. It's not that different for us, human animals ;)

I didn’t downvote you,

I did not designated anyone in particular, I was just trying to encourage whoever downvoted to also express their motivation/reasoning. I'm more than willing to learn from my mistakes, but I can't learn shit without at the very least some form of an argument beside 'Nah, don't like u/what u said' (which is perfectly fine by me, just not very... interesting).

Maybe some folks thought it was a cop out answer,

Thx, I did not know that expression and had to check its meaning. I can confirm it wasn't a cop out, just the question that crossed my mind when I started reflecting on the OP question (a question I may have poorly understood, though, as English is not my first language).

No TV, no ads. Simple.

My spouse and I have not been forced to watch a TV-ad since the late 90S. Since the day we got rid of our TV once and for all, when we realized the were expecting us to pay good money to buy a TV set and then still have to watch their ads, and more and more of them? Not the best deal. So thx, but no. 25 years later, we still have to regret it once ;)

Replying to myself, in the hope of being read by the people downvoting my first comment: you realize silently downvoting doesn't help me understand the slightest why you disagree with what I wrote and where I may be mistaken, right?

I get that but, no matter their strategy, aren't they still competing against one another for the same resources: a (better) ranking in the leaderboard?

• MullvadVPN, and a free and privacy respecting OS is another good idea.
• So is using privacy respecting apps: LibreOffice instead of MS Office, Codium instead of VSCode. And so on, with many FLOSS alternatives to the usual proprietary ones.
• Services also matter, imho: I'm using ProtonMail for my email (Tuta would be another clever choice, imho, and there are probably others). I've very recently switched from iCloud to filen.io for my cloud storage needs.
• Using one's phone as little as possible. I've almost nothing on mine, I mean only stuff I'm required to have (banking and IDs, stuff like that), no email, no social, not even music or games (the game I enjoy the most play I also I enjoy it the most when I play it offline: chess ;))

And then... I also started using analog tools much more in the last two years. This helps a lot maintaining one's privacy. Amazon can't track my reading habits when I read a printed book (even less if I do not buy it from them), Goofle cant'" track my writings when I use pen and paper instead of their apps, Apple (or Google or Microsoft) can't track my paper agenda or my paper notebook. And the NSA or whomever is playing that role in my country can't ask any corporation to install backdoors in my IRL encounters with people so they could spy on me. At least, they cannot do that for now ;)

What was a time that two adversaries had such different objectives...

Then, would they be adversaries in any meaningful way? I mean, fighting against someone means both must be competing for the... same objective, resources, whatever. If they aren't they aren't competing.