Kalisme · Guideposts

You haven’t lost your love of reading, your attention is being held elsewhere

If you reread the same paragraph three times, or your phone calls you after a single page, you haven’t lost the ability to read: your attention is being called on elsewhere, constantly, by things designed to hold it. Kalisme, a way of living born in Lausanne, comes down to 13 simple sentences that remind you what you’re allowed to do for yourself. This one says: “You’re allowed to take your attention back”.

By Hakan Kaynar · Published on 09.11.2026

This isn’t laziness, it’s attention in heavy demand

The phenomenon is ordinary, and it worries people. A book opened in the evening, one page, then your hand reaching for the phone before you decided anything. An article skimmed, of which nothing is left an hour later. Books started and stacked up on the bedside table. It’s tempting to conclude that you can no longer concentrate, or no longer enjoy it, or that you’ve broken something for good.

The Kalisme manifesto, “The Kaliste”, offers a less accusing reading. Its third chapter points out that attention is the most coveted resource of our time: notifications, algorithms, headlines tuned for alarm, everything is built to capture it. The more information there is, the less attention is left for each piece. Your attention hasn’t disappeared. It is in heavy demand, and almost never by you.

A book asks for nothing, and that is why it loses

Your phone buzzes, lights up, suggests, nudges again. A book waits. It doesn’t call you back, it doesn’t even know you left. In a contest like that, whatever asks for nothing almost always loses, not because it’s worth less, but because it doesn’t shout.

The manifesto adds a useful point: multitasking is largely a myth. For any task that takes attention, the brain switches from one to the other, and every switch has a cost. Reading with a lit screen within reach means paying that cost with every glance, then being surprised to feel tired after ten pages.

Taking your attention back doesn’t mean forcing yourself

The first reflex is discipline: an hour of reading a day, an app that blocks the others, one more resolution. Kalisme offers something else. Its third sentence doesn’t say “you must concentrate”, it says “you’re allowed to take your attention back”. It isn’t a test to pass, it’s a right you had stopped using.

The manifesto puts it this way: managing your attention means choosing for yourself what you feed, and cutting off the rest. It isn’t fleeing the world, it’s staying in it, in your own place. Reading then becomes again what it may have been at the start: a place where nobody but you decides what you look at.

This idea rests on two things: treating yourself as someone who matters, and choosing where your attention goes. Here, it’s the second, applied to a few pages.

You’re also allowed to read less, and slowly

Taking your attention back doesn’t mean getting back to an old pace, or catching up on an overdue pile. You’re allowed to read ten pages and stop. To reread a passage you liked instead of moving on. To give up on a book that doesn’t speak to you: that isn’t a reader’s failure, it’s attention choosing where it settles.

Comparison lurks here too, with the people who post their fifty books of the year. That count says nothing about what reading gives you. You never compare yourself to someone, you compare yourself to a summary, and a number of books is one more.

Two moves to give reading its place back

Do the sorting from the third chapter. Draw two columns: what feeds you, what drains you. Spot three sources of distraction that come back every evening. Cut one of them this week, just one, and on the seventh day notice what its absence has freed up. It may be time to read. It may be something else, and that is an answer too.

Read in a room your phone isn’t in. Not switched off in your pocket: somewhere else. Pick a short book, or a book you’ve already loved, and set yourself a modest length of time, one you’re sure to manage. If you drift off, go back to the last sentence you read without blaming yourself. If your mind wanders elsewhere rather than towards the screen, that’s a different mechanism: attention that is never given a direction.

Sources

The economist Herbert Simon put forward in 1971 the idea that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

When it weighs more

If the trouble concentrating spreads to everything, at work as at home, for several weeks, and comes with tiredness or sadness, talk to a doctor about it. That is the right door, and knocking on it early is never overdoing it.

In an emergency: 999 in the United Kingdom, 911 in the United States, 144 in Switzerland.

To talk to someone, day or night: Samaritans on 116 123 in the United Kingdom, the 988 Lifeline in the United States, La Main Tendue on 143 in Switzerland.

Elsewhere, the numbers for your country are on findahelpline.com.

Tonight, leave your phone in another room and read a page, just one. If you read a second, all the better. If not, you’ve already taken something back.