On Story Addiction, and the Escape It Offers

This episode looks at the experience of losing track of time inside a book — that sudden awareness that two hours have passed — and what that feeling might actually be doing for us.It touches on the tension between keeping a wide view of life and the quiet cost of that wideness. Work, family, the direction of a business, old age, the planet — when all of it stays visible at once, it wears on a person.There's a small detail from running an eyeglass shop: during the busy stretches, when new store openings pile up and schedules fall apart, the habit is still thirty minutes of reading before bed. Not planning the next day. Just stepping into a story and letting the view narrow — and finding that by morning, a problem that felt unsolvable looks, for some reason, a little smaller.The episode also gently reframes the word "addiction" — not as something shameful, but as a sign that human beings may simply not be built for constant, wide-open awareness. Someone absorbed in love, or in work, or in a story is narrowing their view in ways that look foolish or unproductive from the outside, but are producing something inside.A quiet reflection on why everyone needs something at hand that can absorb them — and on the idea that seventy percent reality, thirty percent something absorbing, might be just about the right balance for a life.