You are not what you read

Or are you?

A lot of us tend to believe that we are what we eat or read. To a certain extent that could be true.

If you eat unhealthy, processed, junk food then you eventually pay the consequences, it does catch up with you down the road. If on the other hand you eat healthy, real, wholesome food in reasonable amounts you see great results for your health.

Losing weight and maintaining a healthy body is more than 80% what you eat and the other 20% is your movement and lifting.

So you are actually made up of what you eat and drink, cause there’s a lot of people that are like desert lizards… dry as they come! Hydrate.

Now, about the reading part. You eventually speak your mind. Your mind is made up of thoughts you catch and absorb along your path in life.

Some ideas are passed on, many are disregarded, a lot happen with interactions but the real goal comes from what you read. What you dissect, think about most of the time, question and put to the test in real life.

But are we really what we read? Does one’s reading make them who they are? Or does it simply magnify who they are after a certain age?

Let’s take the example of the kid who is born in the digital era, knows nothing but iPads and iPhones, online is where they have lived most of their lives. They read what their peers online suggest, usually in bit sized chunks.. never the whole book or idea.

They manage to average hundred of YouTube hours watching documentaries made by people that read books and investigated their respectful subjects and conducted hours and maybe years of research on the subject before filming the videos.

This is second hand information and knowledge, not bad I say, but still not as good as your personal reading and research on the subjects.

Think of a book you read and how fascinated you are, then watching the book as a movie… that’s the directors and script writers viewpoint, not the one you had created in your own mind.

Back to the idea of being what we read..

I still think that we are only affected not molded into a new individual by the comprehension. But then again you have that friend that only read one book, listened to one artist and has somehow become them? WTF!? It’s true, look around you.

Then you have the other person that has read hundred of books and doesn’t stop sucking the information up, what has she become? Is she more informed? Deeper? Well rounded? most probably she is, but how rounded? How grounded? How in the moment is she?

Then take the reader that filters what they read, has real life experience, puts some of what they read to the test in life, what are they to you? More rounded? More grounded?

Reading does not make you, it shapes and affects you. The more you read, the more you filter what goes in and is useful and what is garbage, you wouldn’t know what is garbage until you actually read a lot. Get exposed to various areas in life and many, many writers.

So what do you think? are we what we read? Or not?