How do we become wise in the age of the bottomless scroll?

An ode to Reader's Digest and the commonplace book

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My Dad is one of the wisest people I know.

How did he become wise? That is an excellent question, and it likely doesn’t have a simple answer. But: He had wise parents and other beloved adults who poured into him throughout his childhood and beyond. He reads great books and studies history. (He does, in fact, have a PhD in international diplomacy.) He is friends with silence and makes space to think deeply. He writes to understand his thoughts. He loves to talk to all sorts of people, exchanging ideas and broadening his horizons. He asks good questions. He has lived a lot of life by this point, storing up a trove of cause-and-effect data.

But there is another route he took to acquiring wisdom, especially early in his life, and I didn’t know about it until late last year.

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Shortly after we moved into our new home (actually, before we officially moved in), my Dad moved in his own boxes. In the general hubbub, he saw an opportunity to make good on a casual promise I’d forgotten about almost as soon as I’d made it: to help him organize his lifetime of memorabilia. So, in October, he stacked his six dusty boxes in an out-of-the-way corner of our new home and headed back to Connecticut, giving me free rein to make sense of them at my leisure.¹

The corner was hard to ignore. Though he had assigned no urgency to the task, I found myself shifting aside higher-priority boxes in the days after our move to attend to these dusty ones.

And they were, indeed, dusty. He had warned me that he had simply plucked the boxes from where they had been stored, mouldering in his closet, and transferred them undisturbed to my home. He had done no sorting, no culling, no editing whatsoever. That, he had left to me.

When I carefully opened the flaps, I could see that there was some organization: this box held trophies, that one, photos. Taken together, the boxes held memories from his childhood to the present day, mostly unfamiliar to me but also unsurprising: diplomas and commissions I knew he’d earned (even if they were before I was born); sermons and speeches I knew he’d given (even if I hadn’t been there to hear them); thank you notes I knew he’d received (even if I didn’t recognize the sender’s name).

But there was one category that surprised me, and that was the clippings: folders upon folders of yellowed paper clippings. Torn out of magazines and newspapers, they covered every conceivable category of life that might have concerned a young husband, father, military officer: Marriage. Raising kids. Raising girls, as would come to be his specialty. Handling deployments. Personal finance. Education. Being a good citizen of a democracy. And — there’s no better word for it — wisdom.

Some were entire articles. Others were carefully excised quotes. Many of them were from Reader’s Digest.

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Are you familiar with Reader’s Digest? You probably are. It was a staple in my home growing up, and in seemingly every home I frequented. This is not surprising: at its peak in the 1980s, it had over 23 million global subscribers and a readership estimated at 70 million. It was the most-read publication on Earth.²

Founded in 1922 by a husband-and-wife team with a passion for accessible knowledge and uplifting content, their concept was simple but brilliant: offer readers a digest of the best articles from across the media landscape, rewritten and shortened to fit a pocket-sized monthly that could be read cover to cover — “a compact literary revolution for the masses.” Each issue contained a mix of human interest stories, general knowledge articles, humor, and inspirational pieces. Differing from the more high-brow publications from which they plucked pieces for inclusion, the Digest’s mission was to distill great writing and journalism for a broad audience.

In 2010, Reader’s Digest cut its circulation guarantee from 8 million to 5 million. As of 2024, its combined print and digital U.S. circulation stood at 1.8 million per issue, down 22% from the year before.³

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The idea of this young Coast Guard officer — this newly-minted father of one, then two, then three little girls — storing up bits of advice that he thought would make him the best person he could be is unbearably dear to me. He knew he had things to learn, and he wanted to learn them.

As precious as this particular man and his quest are to me, though, I don’t think he is unique. As David Brooks noted in a column, “as we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture — the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life. That education, including lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable.”

He continued:

“This value is based on the idea that life is filled with hard choices: whom to marry, whom to vote for, whether to borrow money. Your best friend comes up to you and says, ‘My husband has been cheating on me. Should I divorce him?’ To make these calls, you have to be able to discern what is central to the situation, envision possible outcomes, understand other minds, calculate probabilities.

Americans had less schooling in decades past, but out of this urge for intellectual self-improvement, they bought encyclopedias for their homes, subscribed to the Book of the Month Club and sat, with much longer attention spans, through long lectures or three-hour Lincoln-Douglas debates.”

“Actively initiating a search for information on the web may not weaken your reasoning skills,” notes Brooks. “But passively scrolling TikTok or X weakens everything from your ability to process verbal information to your working memory to your ability to focus. You might as well take a sledgehammer to your skull.”

What, then, are we to do if we wish to become wise these days? The everyman’s magazine is a shell, while scrolling is altogether too powerful.

Books? Yes, by all means. Spending time around wise people, absolutely. Learning from experience — if we must.

And one more thing, perhaps: the commonplace book.

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What is a commonplace book? It is a place to pin down any tiny wings of wisdom you find along the path — your own curated collection of truth, beauty, goodness. Great thinkers and ordinary people alike have kept books like this throughout history, using their journals to gather quotes and passages and then offering that wisdom to the people they love.

After sifting and sorting my Dad’s boxes, I delivered my recommendations: photos should get stored with other photos, sermons and messages should be put in page protectors and clipped into a binder, certificates could be put in another binder. And those clippings, I said, were made for a commonplace book: arrange by topic, trim, paste, annotate. Add over time.

And then, in time, pass it on. Share with your grandchildren what has been of use to you — what has stood the test of time versus flicking past on a screen, forgotten instantly. A compact literary revolution not for the masses, but for the one, or two, or three. Because if there are any shortcuts to wisdom, a grandparent is one of them.

What do you think, friends? Do you keep a commonplace book? I have a digital one, and I treasure it, but this exercise with my Dad has made me want to create a physical one, too. I also want to print out talks, sermons, and messages I’ve delivered over the years — far fewer than him, at this point, but almost all (currently) consigned to the digital realm. Just like photos, I’d love to have them in a more easily-sharable format for posterity ❤️

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1. Headed back to CT only after painting a room, replacing every switch plate in the house, changing out light bulbs, building shelves, and many other handyman tasks. Thanks, Dad!!

2. https://www.davidsalariya.com/post/readers_digest_history

3. https://pressgazette.co.uk/media-audience-and-business-data/media_metrics/us-magazine-circulations-2024/