Last night I hit a 500-day reading streak on my Kindle.

Which is to say on my Kindle App because I don’t think my Kindle, not even my newer Colorsoft one, has any sort of streak/days-of-reading/Kindle Challenge type screen. Maybe it does. I’m not going to look for it.

That’s neat though, hitting that. Only you can likely tell from the fact that the number of books I read on Kindle are only 31 this year [roughly 3 a month] so it doesn’t quite line up. With the move and all, it’s been a rough year for reading a lot.

I have maintained the act of looking at pages on a screen in a prescribed manner. I am the best.

Four quick thoughts and then to my morning workout with me! Why this streak is a lie…

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it’s actually longer…

The real total is something like 800 days. Twice over the past 2-3 years, the system has essentially not counted days when I have 100% read something. The last hiccup, apparently 500 days ago, was after I had spent a couple of hours finishing the back half of some book.

I remember being irate at the time because not only had I read for some time, but because I had the book in my library clearly marked as finished and had submitted a rating through the app. The “Finished Date” and presumably the “Rating Date” would have been for the day that the same app was claiming I had skipped reading.

Part of the reason I got to 500-days this time is because I was initially fussy about that and then it just became a habit.

I don’t recall the time before but I remember irate at that time, too.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only tracks the bare minimum…

I don’t know what all it actually tracks, not really. Is just opening the app enough? Just opening a book? The truth is that at 100-days of those 500-days were me opening the app or my Kindle (etc) and just reading for maybe 3- to 5-minutes. I would guess my average duration per day would not be all that high.

It is nice to have a gentle prod to keep up some reading because reading is a habit you have to nurture. It just might be better if I could set a minimal threshold [e.g., 10 pages, 20 minutes] to actually count.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: it only counts books-on-Kindle…

Probably half my reading, or more, in that whole time period was via physical books. Which means I either have to do the bare minimum opening of the app to satisfy above or I have to get a book on Kindle and on paper and then move the Kindle version forward.

I have done a bit both. Where both feel silly.

The Streak Is a Lie Because: the constant gamification of everyday pleasures is a poison…

In this case, the streak is not so much a lie as a constant external stressor to stay addicted to an app for reasons only tangentially related to the purpose of the app. Reading some is not hard for many of us but reading regularly is hard. Much like diet apps and exercise apps and productivity apps and language apps and many others: having this gamification added to them can help you to hit goals. That is true.

However, the fact that so many apps have such streaks and such baked in is mentally draining. We can no longer just play our games. Now, we have to play our games daily for shiny lights and particle effects to keep blessing us. Skip a day and you might just receive a meaningless warning. Our gentle hobbies to survive the soul-crushing march of modern life have been turned into just another stress for us to endure.

The whole time our personal data and habits are being scraped and digested by The Algorithm. Using the app is giving them permissions to dig deeper into our lives.

And we don’t even get paid. Hell, we pay for it.

Anyhow, off to see if I can hit 1000-days.