Skimming time

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I’ve been noticing an awful behavior in myself: skimming.

When articles are longer, even if engaging, I find myself beginning to skim partway through, my eyes darting around searching for keywords alone to understand and judge the content, even as I know that that is not understanding.

When I read books, I now sometimes skim pages to get to the book’s end sooner, so I can move on to the next book, because my ever-growing TBR list is, well, ever-growing. I have lists of books I want to read this year, which I do every year, and never get through said lists. Yet I make them anyway, adding more to it, even as I barely cut through the titles.

And I wonder, how much of this is driven by my need to add and track my reading goals? How much am I being driven to read more, learn more, understand more, because of all the lists I create, and the reading goals (# books, # pages) on Storygraph or Goodreads I set for myself each year? Perhaps, I wonder, that the goal of reading less but more fully, is actually the better goal. That instead of saying I will read 100 books this year, perhaps I should tell myself, I will read 40 books this year. Or maybe, I have no goal in mind, except to understand a chosen topic.

This year, I actually deleted my initial reading and page goals on Storygraph, and instead decided to simply read, only tracking titles I’ve finished, and the lists of books, the Challenges, I want to participate in. Now, I’m wondering if I should even bother with those Challenges as they are, and instead curating one single list of limited titles, based on a topic I want to learn more about this year. That instead of worrying about how many books I’m getting through, I should consider what I’m thinking deeply about. Rather than fear of missing out on knowledge, which drives me to rush through a book to get to the next, I ant to reframe it as sitting with wisdom, which can only come after letting knowledge take its time. What is the use of rushing through the pages, only to come out the other end with only a vague notion of what I’ve “learned?” It is not, in fact, learning.

I wrote in another article that I purged my home library of 200+ physical books, which has helped me more clearly select books to read, because I’m not caught up in analysis paralysis. And it has helped, as I pulled out books I bought a dozen years ago, and have finally cracked open. One title, The One Taste of Truth: Zen and the Art of Drinking Tea I am certain I’ve had since the early 2010s. Now, as a ritual, I make golden milk and read just a few pages, trying to imbibe the wisdom in the pages. The book is short, and yet I’ve been going through just a few pages per week, hardly making a dent in finishing the book. And I’m fine with that.

This year, something’s switched in my brain, where I am feeling less driven by goals and to-dos and being productive, something I spoke to in my article, The Stillness of Sufficiency. This drive to shed even reading goals, in terms of the numbers, is one piece of this overarching puzzle. I don’t mourn it, which I find surprising, because I have always been driven by “the numbers:” school grades, work performance review ratings, and everywhere else numbers show up in our lives: “likes” and comments on social media, the number that shows up when we step on the scale, the number of social events we attend, etc.

Something is in the 2026 air, because I am done with tracking and trackers, with distilling my lift into “the numbers.” Perhaps it’s because it all seems futile and only serves to create anxiety, perhaps it’s fatigue, or perhaps it is emotional growth. Whatever the reason, I find it is more fulfilling, and a necessary shift in my intellectual, emotional, and life maturity.

The only “number” I think I am beginning to care about is, well, none in particular. I simply want to live more fully, slowly, and with a depth I seem to have lost over the years. I don’t want to skim, I want to immerse, to take my time, and to shed old ways of simply moving from one goal or task to the other and replace that with more holistic views of being. Instead of relying on a quantified experience of life, I want to live in a more exploratory and contemplative way. Instead of having a “backlog” pressure, I want to feel free to read as much or as little, and to take as much space as I need to to fully feel and understand what I’m reading.

Even my writing has changed this year. I am focusing less on all the manuscripts I am dying to write, all the stories I am desperate to tell, and more on simply telling a good story and giving it space and time to breathe. I’ve begun exploring a manuscript this year I hadn’t planned on, the beginning of the story simply coming to me. It’s been a couple weeks now, and I’m five chapters in, when typically by this time, I’d probably be a third or more done with the first draft. And yet, I feel no sorrow, no ache, no anxiety to finish.

Rather, I’ve had the thought of, “it will take the time it takes.” And, I’m allowing my brain to sit with the story, as I am only working on the writing two days a week, rather than daily. I don’t know where this will lead me, surely not on a bestseller list, but I do think it will allow me to be more intentional with this story, and to craft something more meaningful. Or perhaps not, and that is okay, I think.

The idea of not tracking in the past would have left me anxious and wondering, “how would I know how far I’ve come?” but now, it has me feeling more, “look how much time I’m giving myself.” It feels healing, almost spiritual, as if respecting time and letting it simply exist around me is less about what has been done in this hour, and more, what has this hour held. Rather than measuring life, I want to inhabit it.

Creativity demands time and incubation, a sense of forgetting about the specifics and letting the brain sharpen the blurry edges.
It’s something I’m trying new; I’ll let you know how it goes.

By: Rania Hanna

obedience

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Lately, I’ve been reading about Solomon Asch’s conformity study and Stanley Milgram’s obedience to authority work.

In Asch’s conformity study, conducted in 1951, he was examining how people behave in a group setting, whether social pressure from the majority could cause a person to conform. He had false participants, who were working with him, in a “visual perception test,” along with a real participant. They had to compare the lengths of lines, and determine which was the longest, etc. with an obvious answer. The false participants, or confederates, would choose a wrong answer, while the participant was tested on whether they would change their answer to match the group’s obviously incorrect response.

In many cases, they did.

In Milgram’s obedience studies, conducted in the 1960s, he had a real participant, the “teacher” give word lists to a “learner,” who was really a confederate. Whenever the learner got a word wrong, the teacher had to “shock” them with increasingly higher voltages. If the teacher hesitated or refused, a researcher in a white lab coat urged them to continue, assuring them the shocks were painful but not dangerous, even though the shock panel suggested otherwise. The teacher believed the shocks were real, and so the experiment was meant to test whether a person would listen to an authority figure, no matter if they thought they were hurting another person.

He found that often, they would, even if they themselves were distressed at causing pain to another person by shocking them. Milgram’s findings are upsetting because they show that ordinary people will participate in harm when told by an authority that it is necessary, or good.

The studies have their flaws, for certain, and have been criticized on whether they tested what they were set out to test, especially in the Milgram’s study. But ultimately, I do think these experiments show something of human behavior: we rely on others to know what to do, especially if the others are in positions of power, or in the majority group. It also tells us that authority can be judged critically and not simply followed.

Both experiments demonstrate how profoundly social context shapes individual behavior. People look to others to determine what is normal, acceptable, or necessary. Yet this social-cue dependence cuts both ways. If people follow the group, then changing the group, even slightly, can change the individual. In other words, all it may take is one or two people standing up, giving others permission to do the same.

And obedience to authority can be retaught to distinguish between benevolent and harmful authority. Just because someone is in authority does not mean they need to be obeyed. Just because something is deemed law does not mean it is legal, ethically speaking.

Often, we may find ourselves in situations where we go along with the group, because it seems safer to do so than to go against the grain. And yet, just one person going against the grain can bring others alongside them. That person can be you, or it can be another person who has taken that first step and you decide to step with them.

We do not have to obey those in power, and we do not have to go with those in the majority around us.

In the community where I grew up, many people hold political beliefs and values I have never shared. Speaking openly about that difference often places me in the minority. Yet I have learned that minorities are rarely alone for long. When one person speaks, others recognize themselves in that voice. I have learned to be more outspoken–writing my thoughts here and publishing them for others to read–because I first saw others do the same.

What all this means is that people are strongly influenced by group pressure and by even the perception of authority, but this same social tendency means that a single dissenting voice can catalyze change. The Asch and Milgram studies are usually touted as evidence of how people so easily mold themselves to others’ wills. Yet their deeper implication is not that people are weak or easily molded, but that group consensus itself can be surprisingly fragile, and one dissenting voice may be enough to shift behavior.

Non serviam. Sapere aude.
I will not serve. Dare to know.

By: Rania Hanna

and yet.

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It’s been a struggle the last few years, with the ongoing genocide in Palestine perpetrated by Israel and the United States; the expansion of Zionist Israeli control of Palestinian, Lebanese, and Syrian land in their “Greater Israel” efforts; the unprovoked, unwarranted attack on Iran by the same actors already named; and the widening destruction of the planet by the few and wealthy, in charge. The US is holding people, including US citizens, hostage in concentration camps. Our politicians, who have always been liars, have become insatiable liars.

Power concentrates in institutions and individuals, in militaries, monarchies, taxation, surveillance, economic coercion. This organization and concentration outweighs the power of numbers. Large and diverse and dispersed populations are less likely, or perhaps less able, to come together, divided across economic, racial, class, and other lines.

Never mind that those in power stoke those divisions.

When livelihood is tied to these institutions, even indirectly, when people’s survival depend on their jobs, access to social services, access to grids run by corporations such as their water and power, it can serve to shackle people into fear and complacency. If you can’t fight, and you can’t flee, you play dead, and economically and socially, you play dead by turning inward and sticking your head in the sand.

And yet.

In the last few years, people around the world have come together in beautiful solidarity, to protest against war and genocide, to demand the freedom of American-held hostages on our own soil, to call for the release of this country and its destructive grip on the world.

Humans are kind. People are compassionate, communal. I’ve been reminded of this again and again, when I see harm done by one, and the many work to undo that damage.

But what I am also reminded of is that the minority who do cause harm, who do perpetrate violence, are the ones who hold the most power. Of course, they are few among many, and the many together are far more powerful than the few who band together in their violent orgies. I have seen people screaming in the streets, and their demands met with force, and yet, other times, their screams are heard and make positive change for life on this planet.

Why is this?

Because the few in power know that the many can topple them, not at first, not immediately or even quickly, but eventually. I don’t know enough history to provide concrete examples, and the ones that do come to mind, such as the the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, Seminoles in Florida, I don’t know enough about to say definitely it was the many who overturned the few. I think that’s the case, though I don’t know the details, and I don’t know the hows. But I do know it happened, and it can happen again, and again, and again.

Concentrated power is never permanent, though it changes hands, and continues on in much the same way, unless stopped. When the wider population coordinate and sustain their collective goals, their effect on systems can produce dramatic evolution. When the populace shares the same narrative of, we are all suffering injustice, that shared narrative becomes a shared yoke to plow the fields into more just plains.

I don’t know much, but I do believe this: collective resistance will lead to collective change.

(Excuse any typos; I’m too tired to care).

By: Rania Hanna

Diasporic silence

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Being in the diaspora is like living split-body: one part always left behind in the ancestral homeland, the other part desperately, constantly, trying to root itself in the “new world.”

Both parts end up never quite anywhere, in a no-man’s land, belonging neither here nor there.

And nowhere does this show up the most than when the country we live in, were likely born in, or at least whose accent we speak with, invades, bombs, and destroys our homeland. In the US, this shows up with constant invasions, bombing campaigns, human life reduced to “collateral damage” of those who look, sound, and live like our families. All the while, those of the diaspora must continue to work, grinding in a hyper-capitalistic society, with no reference to our bombed and destroyed homelands. Our jobs demand we continue working, continue “providing value,” all while they invest in the very war machines that had forced our families out of our homelands in the first place.

There is rarely, if ever, recognition of what our countries are doing to others, no support for those who have to live keeping one eye on the news, another on Zoom or Slack, waiting to hear from family, and mourning even when we do, because we live in constant worry and fear for them.

The great pain is when we stand solid in the face of “what is going on over there,” and our jobs tell us “how professional” we are, because we are keeping it together outwardly and not bringing things up that may upset people, or that is too political. As if our existence demands our silence to keep other people’s comfort and convenience intact.

Even when our jobs do try so support, it is through mental health resources. And too often, Western mental health is predicated on western ideals and western family dynamics and western concerns, which leaves those in the diaspora, often from more Eastern backgrounds, in a worse spot. Because now, we are being “given resources” but these resources fall short of anything we need. It ends up being a greater burden to have to reject the resources, and either find our own, or simply go on existing in a fugue state.

And still, some people would say, “go back to where you came from if you like it there so much,” not realizing that the reason we had to leave, the reason our families left their homelands, is because they had no good choices. Either stay and be killed by a foreign war machine, or leave to that war machine and try not to let it grind you from within.

Even if we do manage to “assimilate,” whatever that means, we are then blamed for our own suffering, told that if our people weren’t led by dictators and despots, that if we didn’t need “saving,” then we would be left alone.

But as has been said before, “Americans are very lucky, because wherever they go to bring freedom… they find oil.” — Michele Serra, Italian journalist.

(Excuse any typos; I am too tired to care).

By: Rania Hanna

The stillness of sufficiency

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What is a life for, production or presence?

There’s no doubt U.S. American culture is shaped by, and founded on, productivity. From the shores of African and Black enslavement, where a body’s output was the measuring stick of a person’s value, to the assembly lines of the Industrial revolution that further quantified human value by human output, nothing defines the United States better than a “can-do” attitude and a productivity clause that seems to be written into us from birth.

This clause seems to be part of a contract many of us have unwittingly signed, one that stipulates our value, our worth, our personhood, to be defined by what we produce, that is, our corporate and consumerist output.

We are expected to produce (not create) and consume until our dying breaths. We are taught that to be citizens of society, we must be valuable, and that value is calculated by how much money we make for others.

This isn’t to say that work is unnecessary or undignified; far from. The question is, who the work benefits, how much we agree to it, and what we get out of it. Many of us are content with our 40-hour weeks and our paychecks in return for that time. And that is fine.

But what I’ve been thinking about lately is how creativity and productivity are intertwined. As a published author, I expect myself to produce book after book, on deadlines I arbitrarily create for myself, in an effort to produce. Sometimes, this is fine, and my creative juices need an outlet, which I am able to give them. Other times, I’m unsure of how much I expect my creativity to be manufactured by a sense of productivity.

Often, I catch myself between projects, with a week or so of “downtime,” and I tell myself, I should be doing research, I should be planning my next manuscript, I should be, should be, should be…

And yet, with my background in neuroscience, I know full well the brain does not operate best while constantly stimulated. The brain works best in between resting periods, and during such times, where it can consolidate information and experiences, define connections between them, and imagine new things. Incubation is necessary for human intellect, creativity, and even identity. You can’t know who you are if you never sit still long enough to ask–and answer.

In 2025, I wrote five full-length manuscripts, and about 80% of a sixth novel, and was so proud I was able to be “so productive.” This year, I am now working on editing about 4 of those manuscripts, and mourning that I cannot write five more this year, even as I am relieved I don’t plan to. Even with that output, and the stockpile of manuscripts, I still find myself reducing my creative work into commodified components: # manuscripts, # ratings, # reviews, #…

There’s a gap between creativity and productivity, between creating for the joy of it, and creating a commodity. Even this blog, which has been dormant for a while, I’ve now revived, and just the other day, I wondered idly whether I should be monetizing it, whether I should be more consistent in what I publish, whether this could be something I commodify as a secondary income stream.

I quickly rejected the idea, not the least because, even if I could monetize it, it wouldn’t be worth much in the dollars it brings in. But there’s another reason: this space is one for me to think and share those thoughts, rather than turning it into a “hustle,” and I intend to keep it that way (for now, maybe for forever). It’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing more, being more, producing more, at the expense of simply being.

This is not to disregard the times when finances demand such labor, and this is not to disregard the lives where such privilege and luck are not afforded. I recognize my concerns come from a plentitude of both. But where I am in life, I have to consider beyond basic needs that are already met, and more.

To be a creative, to be an artist, is to learn to rest and be still, something I am desperately struggling to learn beyond an intellectual understanding.

It’s not comfortable sitting still or doing less; it feels like a failure of self and time, like I am “wasting my life.” And yet, I find the times I do so, that is, rest, my days feel longer, in a good way, and I feel like I’ve done more for myself and my life. Those are the days I am able to marry creative pursuits with more mundane tasks, like errands and social obligations, without feeling tired. In fact, I feel more energized, because I am able to get through to-dos without losing myself in them.

I wonder, then, if a life lived this way lasts longer, not in time, but in the perception of it.

Tonight, as I sit in my living room, watching the blue light fade from the sky and become night, I am allowing myself stillness and silence. That is a privilege, and a rarity it seems these days, I know, and I am a lucky person to have such things. But this path to stillness is not straight and narrow. I’m recognizing that stillness can be found not just in the state of “not-doing,” but in the state of “doing enough.”

What I mean can be shown in an example. This year, as I edit my 2025 manuscripts, I am not pushing myself hard. Even today, I planned on editing two to three chapters of a manuscript, ended up editing four, and then grew greedy and tried to push myself to edit even more. I stopped myself in time, recognizing I had hit a fatigue point, and yes, I could have pushed myself to do more, but I would have enjoyed it less, been less creative, and more frustrated. Instead, I chose to leave the coffeeshop and go home, where I sat and read with a cup of golden milk.

Stillness, I wonder then, does not have to show up in sitting in silence or idly; it can come in doing enough to remain on, or to reach the path you want, but not pushing yourself unnecessarily. It demands listening to your mind and body, and not ignoring them just because “you can.”

I “could have” edited more today; I “could have” been more productive, but I was productive enough, and that is good enough for me. This is the stillness of sufficiency.

By: Rania Hanna

Curating against anti-intellectualism

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I’ve been thinking more about curation.

The last few years, I have hoarded more and more books, only to find myself stepping into my home library and not knowing what I want to read. On Google, I have pulled up a random number generator, selecting first a range from 1 to the number of bookshelves I have, and then within that shelf, selecting a range from 1 to 30 or so, to narrow down to a single title. Rarely, which is to say, never, have I pulled that book off its shelf and actually read it.

Instead, I would find myself back at the bookstore, searching for some book to read that suited my mood. I’d come home, either read the book, or end up setting it atop a pile and choosing something else to read.

This cycle has continued on to the point of a certain fatigue, and, if I’m being honest, frustration at not knowing what to read or how to choose.

My home library has traditionally numbered in the hundreds, sometimes rising to 600+ books, which I’ve always taken pride in. There’s a certain comfort in surrounding myself with the written word, being inspired by others’ thoughts, and always aspiring to read every book I own.

These physical books are besides the audiobooks and digital copies I have bought over the years.

The past few weeks though, in a fit of early spring cleaning, I have purged about 200 physical books, over the span of several weeks, donating many to my local library.

And the more I do so, the more books I want to let go of. It’s been surprisingly easy to do, something I’ve rarely, if ever, experienced before. I still have books piled atop books, and on my bookcases, and crammed in piles surrounding the space, but the gaps are beginning to show.

Some of the books I have had for well over a dozen years, having never opened them once to read. Others I thought I would enjoy, only to find myself tossing it aside. Still others I enjoyed at one point in my life, but have grown away from them.

Now, my shelves are taken up by books I have yet to read, but have a higher likelihood of being selected in the coming months and years. I have saved stories I have enjoyed, ones I would recommend to someone. In other words, I have curated something of a proper library, one that represents who I am and who I am becoming.

Books that I once revered have been removed; stories I once thought I “should” enjoy have been replaced by ones I will. I am growing far less concerned about having “classics” on my shelves that I do not enjoy, though I have tried to.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about more and more recently: literary colonialism.

When thinking about the books I grew up reading in the United States, in school or simply through exposure, most have been Eurocentric, written by white people, mostly male. They have been excellent reads, and have provoked thought and consideration. But rarely has my formal education expanded beyond these identities. Even in world literature classes, anything outside that identity was pulled from more ancient epics, like that of Gilgamesh, or snippets here and there from other works, but mostly, even our global narratives were pulled from England (Shakespeare), Germany (Beowulf), Italy (Dante’s Inferno, Divine Comedy), Greece (Homer’s works), and the like, i.e. Eurocentric, white, male. I don’t recall reading a single Black author in school in any meaningful way, not Toni Morrison’s works, Octavia Butler’s, the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s, even MLK Jr’s. Not a single Black American author, not a single brown author, and limited female ones.

Why is that?

I am certainly not the first to argue this literary limitation, and certainly not the first to do anything about it, nor am I the most educated voice on this. But as I grow more into myself and into who I want to be, I am learning to lean less on what I have been told is worthy of being read, and more on what I think is deserving of my energy.

This is important. Stories we read shape what we think people should be and how they should act. They tell us what to value, what to reject. They tell us how to be. And that is a powerful and dangerous power.

In curating my library, I am not seeing the loss of 200 books; I am seeing the gain of the space I am making for other voices to be heard. I am creating opportunity to listen to those I have not historically listened or paid attention to, or the ones I wasn’t exposed to in my education. In essence, I am curating not just a library, but my own curiosity. And that is one of the greatest things I can do in developing my mind.

There also seems to be a metaphor in here about stepping back, narrowing focus, and being more deliberate. While my shelves are being cleared off, I’m seeing more of the titles I already own, books that I want to read being more visible because they’re no longer hidden by other titles. A reversal of paralysis by analysis, I suppose.

With our society’s descent into a defanged intellectualism, that is, anti-intellectualism, by way of book bans, whitewashing of history, erasure of voices, and the like, this has become all the more pressing. It feels almost like survival in its urgency.

I plan to continue this curation, centering voices I have not historically given space to, and educating myself the best way I can. I am also retaining physical copies of works, something I touched upon in another blog post, access is not ownership. When reality can be manipulated, media updated or deleted, it is that much more important to house physical copies when and where possible, and to support those institutions that allow us access, like libraries.

By: Rania Hanna

“Hanna’s a last name?! Last?”

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I work as a user researcher, and today was rough. A midday participant asked me as we were beginning our session whether my name, which shows up as Hanna, Rania is ‘Hanna’ or ‘Rania.’ I told him it’s Rania, and he expressed such confusion about how a last name could be Hanna.

“Hanna’s a last name?! Last?”

“Yes,” I said, about to launch into how it’s an old Christian Syrian name, meaning “John,” but I decided not to bother.

His immediate question was, “Are you Indian?”

“No,” I said, “It’s Middle Eastern,” referring to my name.

“You’re Arabic?” he asked.

“Arabic’s a language, I’m Middle Eastern, I’m Syrian.”

“So where are you speaking to me from? What part of the world? Are you…over there?”

At this point, I’m feeling snarky, so I said, “What does my accent sound like to you?”

“Well, from here,” he said.

“Yeah, I’m American, I was born here.”

He tried continuing the conversation, but I said we had a few minutes before the session so I would be stepping out until then.

Later, during the session, with two of my colleagues on the call, this participant proceeded to say, unprompted, “I asked you if you were Indian because I don’t like talking to people in those countries. Whenever I call customer support and get a person from there…I like to talk to people who have my accent. I don’t like when a company outsources to other countries, it doesn’t make me feel valued.”

I quickly messaged a colleague with “wtf.”

The call continued, but I’d lost steam, and quickly ended the call. My second colleague messaged me, offering sympathy and support, and eventually, made me laugh about the whole situation, and I felt much better.

All this leads me to this:

We need community, we need people who reach out to others and offer support. We also need courage to say to those who have grown far too comfortable sharing ignorant opinions, “shut up.” Or, if not that, then certainly something more eloquent and intelligent.

What I mean is, we need to normalize calling people out, and teaching ourselves how to do so. Today is the first time I was confidently “snarky,” which is to say, stood up for myself. It’s not snark, it’s self-protection and calling out people, though I wish I’d done more to be more blatant about his disrespect. We need to learn, and to help others learn, how to speak up more, because so few of us are taught how to do so.

This post is not meant to be anything profound; I simply wanted to share an experience I had today, and offer some of my preliminary thoughts. I’m sure I’ll return to this in the future, once I’ve collected more of my senses and opinions, and perhaps some of my learnings.

By: Rania Hanna

Decentering violence

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I’ve been taking Arabic classes recently to improve my spoken and reading skills. I grew up speaking the Syrian Homs dialect, but since leaving home thirteen years ago, I haven’t been able to speak to anyone as much in Arabic. So the classes are a way I am reclaiming one of my mother tongues and my culture.

During a class recently, my Syrian teacher and I were discussing films. She loves Agatha Christie. And we were talking about the genres we enjoy when we both learned that we used to love horror, and now…we don’t. It’s not that we don’t like a good scare; it’s more the violence and gore that we can’t take in anymore. It’s something I’ve thought about occasionally the last few years, when I have realized that the movies I used to gravitate to: the Saw franchise, slashers, and the like are the ones I can’t stand to see or hear now. Midsommar, which is arguably a good movie, was difficult for me to watch, and I stepped out of the theatre right before the ‘mallet scene.’

Even “softer” movies with a touch of gore do not appeal to me. I still love a good scare, though, and a horror I watched that I think is so engaging is Oddity. It’s less focused on slashing, and more focused on the psychological horror, and though there is violence, is it not as central as in other films.

As I was considering this since my class and conversation, I happened to come across a Threads post that asked a similar question: do you no longer consumer horror? One of the comments got my attention: @alilamos wrote:

“Those movies are all about collective participation and consent. Our brain & body process fake horror the same way as real horror. You rationally know it’s fake, but your brain processes it the same emotionally. So you sitting in a theater being entertained by torture and violence is actually very similar to being one of them enjoying it in real life. It makes us all see violence as entertainment like they want us to.”

It got me thinking that maybe the poster is on to something. The media we consume becomes part of us. Often, I find myself thinking something only to realize that maybe, I simply imbibed it from the internet without even knowing it. How often have you thought of something only to recognize, days later, that you got your “idea” from something else? How often do you choose something and “don’t know why it came to mind,” only to realize afterwards, oh, right, this number I “randomly chose” is ‘actually my grandfather’s birthday and I was thinking of his death anniversary four days ago.’

Our brains are good at patterns and good at consolidating information. They’re also really good at picking up information from our environments, and kneading it into the neural connections that already exist. Of course, memory consolidation requires conscious discernment, but our environments do shape our minds in ways we don’t always notice.

This is not to say that art should be created to coddle or comfort. Of course not. And this is not to say we should not reach for the art that makes us uncomfortable, that pushes our understanding of the world. It’s more that we should reach for consideration, for story, rather than spectacle.

It is to say, however, that we should be aware, and we should actively choose what we consume. Making a spectacle of violence, becoming desensitized to it, does have an effect on us, whether we realize it. We’ve seen it in the ‘video game x violence research’ literature, and though the research is mixed, meta-analyses have found that consuming violence in video games does have a positive correlation with real-world aggression and lowered empathy. Prosocial games have the opposite effect.

I wrote recently about moving into cognitive conservation, about being more aware of what I consume and focusing more on depth and thought. I think the same goes for the media we consume, using it to sculpt our minds and bodies into what we want society to be, rather than letting spectacle and desensitization shape us. We should be left uncomfortable by our art, if and when we so choose, but not be left desensitized towards our collective humanity by it.

Art can wound, expose, accuse, and compel us. But there is a difference between being compelled deliberately, and compelled by default. I want to see more consequence, more substance, in the art and media I consume, and less gratuitous carnage. Some stories, by nature, have carnage, and that is the story that is being told; it may be historical, it may be symbolic, but it is necessary to the telling of that particular story. But to simply have just to have it is another thing altogether. Our minds are molded by what it is fed, and because of that, it is a rare and wondrous thing. To provide it with nourishment is a different form of cognitive conservation than I wrote about last week; it is a conservation of empathy, of society, of self.

Reclaiming Arabic has reminded me that the mind is porous and is easily shaped. What we stay engaged in becomes our fluency, the language we speak best and most naturally. If a tongue can be lost through neglect or severance, and recovered through reversal of that, so, too, can society move towards something better and healthier, starting with the stories being told, and how they are being told, and for whom.

The question isn’t whether art is meant to unsettle us; I think it should. The question, instead, is whether we are choosing what unsettles us, and why, and how. I want to be disturbed into thoughtfulness and awareness, rather than dulled into apathy. I want my Self to be shaped deliberately rather than by status quo, or by those who already hold the reins of narrative and art.

By: Rania Hanna

I think our society is shifting into conservation

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I’m sick this weekend, battling a cold, and just a day before I felt the most sick, I was ravenous. I ate four meals, smaller ones, but more than I would normally consume, and I was starting to slow down in my energy levels. This is normal, as the body mounts an immune response (a metabolically expensive process), and focuses more on energy. Your appetite increases so your body can defend itself, and your body slows down so you conserve energy. Your body shifts from productivity to repair.

The following day, my body gave up, forcing me to take a day off of work. I had trouble sleeping the night before, and ended up dozing off into light naps.

Now, day three of my cold, and I have bursts of energy, but mostly feel like sitting or taking naps, and baking pita bread.

This has got me thinking: when a body is sick, it focuses on slowing down and nourishing itself. I wonder then, of a mind that is also sick with overstimulation and overconsumption. What happens to it?

I think that, it too, slows down and focuses on nourishing itself. I say this because I have noticed that the past few months, I’ve been returning to classics in my reading, craving depth and thought I hadn’t engaged with in a while. I’m seeking more to read to better understand the human condition, to learn, to “return to my roots” in a literary capacity. And, I’ve been focusing on slowing down.

Even in my writing, I am choosing not to push myself, my plots, or my timelines into something they don’t organically grow into. Last year, in 2025, I wrote almost six manuscripts (one I got about 80% of the way through before the new year came around). This year, I am working on editing them, focusing more on building on what I’ve already sown. And though I initially had plans to write at least two, maybe three, manuscripts this year, I have accepted that I may end up writing only one, and have begun to think that I may not write any at all.

This slowing down, both deliberate and organic, comes from shedding old skins last year. I moved on from some decisions I’d made earlier in life, even just years prior, and though I mourn them, I feel lighter without them, more like myself, and less like a shape I was trying to force myself into. That is, I feel more like I am wearing a skin I naturally fit into, rather than stretching out one that no longer fits me.

What I think is happening to my brain is a response to chronic overstimulation, a shift from productivity to repair, a sort of cognitive conservation. This makes sense, as when the brain sustains cognitive overload, i.e. “has too many tabs open,” working memory and decision-making reduce. It’s a sort of “sickness” that your brain decides it has to mount an immune response to, and so it shifts gears into restorative modes.

It’s why my brain has chosen classic literature or more “serious” works to read; it wants something that forces me to slow down because writing pace is slower, compels me to digest what I am reading, which forces me further to slow down. It’s a return to what is familiar and comfortable, and provides a stability as I often recognize what path a plot will take. It also reduces my task-switching: it’s difficult to “switch to another tab” when I’m digesting a thoughtful paragraph. This reading depth leads to sustained attention, which is further less stimulating since I’m focusing on one task, and one task alone.

And I’m seeing it elsewhere, too, not just in my reading. When I was younger, I could sit still, in silence, and enjoy it. The last few years, I have needed stimulation: an audiobook, a podcast, music, a YouTube video. Now, it’s almost as if I can’t stand the noise and stimulation, and instead want stillness and silence.

I’m not alone in this. I wrote in an earlier post “at least for a segment of our society, we desire simplicity and a reclamation of our human intelligence. It feels more like a quiet revolution, an unwinding of what our modern technology has wrought, reverting to less integrated and more simplified routines.“

What I mean to say with all this is as our minds and bodies desire healing from a society that is overwrought in pace, consumerism, and disconnection, I think our minds will begin responding in the same ways our bodies do when sick: by slowing down, digging deeper into our shared wisdom, and doing the things that nourish us. When a biological or psychological system is under strain, it moves to conserve, by simplifying and focusing on core functions.

And I think our society is shifting into conservation.

By: Rania Hanna