Hi there,

Happy Saturday! I hope you had an absolutely fantastic week 🥰

Thank you for being part of the Presently Reading community with 2,317 bookworms from around the world.

Today, we'll be wrapping up Meditations for Mortals​​ by Oliver Burkeman.​

​For the month of July 2025, we're reading ​Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World​ by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.​

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Maneet (pronounced muh-neet)

PS: In case you missed it, I recently started a new daily email series called Day One with Maneet. Every morning, I send a short email with a journal prompt and a quick reflection of my own. It’s been a really meaningful way to start the day, and I’d love for you to join me. Tap here to get the daily emails.​

Weekly Bookmark

I used to think distraction was a character flaw.

Until this week, I’ve always associated deep focus with being a good thing. Heck, just a few months ago, we read the book Indistractable in this book club. I’ve always been hard on myself for getting distracted because it takes me away from the thing I want to be doing. To a certain extent, that still holds true, but this mindset doesn’t capture the whole story.

What if being distracted doesn’t equate to failure?

This week’s chapter from Meditations for Mortals flipped that whole mindset on its head. Oliver Burkeman suggests that distraction isn’t some annoying glitch, it’s actually our baseline setting. Our minds are meant to wander, to bounce between thoughts, to be open to what’s happening around us.

That… made a lot of sense.

Perhaps I’m not broken for being unable to focus for 3 hours straight. Maybe we all just expect too much from our attention spans. And maybe, instead of constantly trying to “fix” distraction, we could start by just accepting it. Our human nature will always be curious about incoming stimuli. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that.

One specific part of the chapter about social media caught my attention.

We usually think apps like TikTok or YouTube distract us. But in reality, they’re doing the opposite. They capture our attention more tightly than anything else. The YouTube algorithm doesn’t scatter your brain. It locks you in. That’s why we fall down rabbit holes for hours at a time.

This kind of focused attention isn’t natural.

We’re not built to be consumed by one idea or thread for that long. It’s not that we’re failing to stay focused, it’s that we’re being forced to focus in unnatural ways. I’m totally guilty of spending too much time in a rabbit hole about random topics the algorithm thinks I should know about.

So, is distraction really the enemy?

Or is it the lack of distraction we should be worried about?

👀 Weekly Poll