I am reading a wonderful book Meditation for Mortals by Olivier Burkeman. It’s made up of 28 short chapters, each offering reflections on the impermanence of life and how to make time for what truly matters.
The book is not a productivity advice book, atleast not in a common way. Instead it approaches from a different direction ; advising that we must first embrace the reality that life is finite, time is finite and we will never get everything done. Only when we embrace this internally, we can be ok with living in the present moment, without being overwhelmed about the past or the future.
In Chapter 5, “Day Five : Too much information”, Burkeman offers three pieces of information on how to manage the information overload. It is the second point which got me thinking deeper.
Resist the urge to stockpile knowledge. Most of the long-term benefits of reading arise not from facts you insert into your brain, but from the ways in which reading changes you, by shaping your sensibility, from which good works and good ideas will later flow.
That sentence challenged almost everything I’d learned about reading. We’re constantly told to take notes, highlight passages, summarize chapters, and store information efficiently. The internet overflows with advice on how to remember more from what we read. Yet Burkeman suggests something radically different : that reading is not about retaining but about becoming.
No wonder, I was intrigued by what Olivier was trying to say. I sat with this for a while and realized how true it feels.
The mind isn’t a storage device, it is more like a landscape, constantly reshaped by the rains of experiences and ideas.
The real benefit of reading is not that you can recall facts later but that you start to see differently. A story might quietly expand your empathy. A philosopher might sharpen your skepticism. A poet might deepen your attention to the world.
The difference is subtle but enormous. Stockpiling knowledge is about ownership: “I know this.” Cultivating sensibility is about orientation: “I see differently now.”
In the end, the measure of a book is not how much you remember but how differently you inhabit the world afterward. Reading should leave fingerprints on your way of thinking, not just notes in your journal.
To read deeply is to enter a lifelong apprenticeship to other minds : not to imitate them but to let their clarity, curiosity, and courage awaken your own. The ultimate goal of reading is not to know more, but to become more.