Keep Doing Some Human Thinking and Learning
“Are you ready for the summer, are you ready for the fun?!”
So goes the opening song of the sleep away camp movie “Meatballs” that introduced us to Bill Murray on the silver screen. (Fair warning: it’s a 1970s summer camp movie, so the humor is exactly what you’d expect, and you’ll both laugh and cringe when watching.)
Summer is the best season of the year. Trips to the beach, corn dogs at the county fair, and warm evening backyard barbecues. One of the themes of summer is summer reading. Kids with summer reading lists to tick off, and grown-ups with summer reads recommended by the New York Times packed in their carry-on bags.
Reading a book feels harder than ever for many of us. These books. So many pages. So many words. Screens full of videos, social media feeds, and AI conversations are so much easier to consume.
Which is why we have to force ourselves to read books. Actually, we have to push ourselves to do a lot of things we used to do more of before screens, social media, and AI arrived. As you plan out your summer, consider the list below of things to challenge yourself to do, not just because they’ll help you keep building your human uniqueness, but because they are also enjoyable experiences.
Read an entire book, one that’s at least 200 pages long. Then, read another one, this time one that’s more than 300 pages in length. Push yourself to read every word on every page, and don’t skip ahead!
Read three full articles from start to finish within the same week, and make sure one of them is a feature length piece from The New Yorker, The Atlantic, or The Economist. Take a break for a snack and some water if your head starts hurting from all that reading.
Write a full article or draft a full report for a project you are working on at your job or in school. And yes, that means no use of AI to do it. Okay, if that feels too daunting a task to undertake without AI’s help, try to at least craft a full outline using just your brain and creativity.
Watch a documentary that’s at least 90 mins long, and that addresses a topic you would normally have no interest in. And as you are watching the documentary, feel what it’s like to learn something new about a subject you never gave a second thought. You’ll be amazed at how excited you’ll be to tell everyone at your next dinner party what you learned.
Prepare and cook a full three course meal, plus make a dessert, for you and a partner or friend. Find the recipes from an actual cookbook (call your parents to see if you can borrow one of them, and trust me, they’ll have dozens of them). Oh, and you can have your partner or friend help cook the meal, it will be more fun that way.
Fix something in your house that’s screaming at you to deal with, clean out and organize your garage or whole floor of your house. Personally, I like the “fix something” challenge because I suck at using tools and being a handyman so this one’s a real mind stretcher for me.
Watch a baseball game live from first pitch to last out. It can be a game at any level from T-ball to the Major Leagues, but whichever game you pick, commit to paying attention to the situations and see if your brain can learn how to anticipate the different things that might happen next. Now, if you choose a T-ball game I do have to warn you — this challenge could last six hours.
This list could go on and on. Go ahead and come up with a couple more things to do that don’t require a screen or an AI tool. Then actually do them. Who knows, you may love this feeling you get when you make the effort to truly think and learn using just your brain.
NextPlay>Forward AI Disclaimer: I very actively use artificial intelligence and large language models to generate the content you read here, but I do review it and edit it to make sure it can be generally useful to people who read it. Keep in mind that AI can make mistakes - check important information. Let me know if I make any errors and I will correct them.