Hi,

Welcome to the Procrastilearning Newsletter, where your time is well spent even though you should probably be doing something else.

3 things worth procrastilearning over

1. If you like huge pillows, you’re a masochist

Those hotels that put 13 enormous pillows on your bed are not pampering you - they are torturing you. Studies show pointlessly large pillows crank your neck into an unnatural forward bend, jacking up muscle strain, stiffness, and that morning headache you blame on 'stress'.​ Oh, and wrinkles.

Ergonomics research recommends a pillow height that cradles your neck without the drama – think 10 cm max. Whatever the recommendation though, you know some people will still say they want huge pillows - perhaps it really is some sort of subconscious self-harm thing. Bigger often does not mean better, and pillows are a case in point.

2. You can get a job folding towels for robots

In southern India, out-of-work engineers are turning towel-folding into their full-time job – hundreds of times a day, with a GoPro strapped to their heads capturing it all in exhaustive detail for AI training datasets. This is the unglamorous grind behind humanoid robots: they need to see thousands of grip nuances and fabric flops to get anywhere near doing their first load of laundry.

Meanwhile, you might have recently heard about Neo, the hyped-up home-bot from 1X. Given what we know about the kind of towel-folding data these robots need, it's no surprise that it actually needs remote operators lurking off-screen, prodding Neo (badly) through all those chores.

Meanwhile, China's vaulting past towels altogether: UBTech's Walker S2 humanoids just landed a $37 million deal to patrol Vietnam-China border crossings, guiding crowds, swapping batteries, and scanning for trouble – no time for towels at all. But if bots can't master mundane chores, I suspect we can't trust them as border control either. So this border robot news does sound dystopian at first, but it also sounds like it’s a lot of slapstick accidents waiting to happen…

3. Reading may be dying, but super readers are on the rise

Daily reading for pleasure in the US has cratered – down 40% over two decades, from 28% of adults in 2004 to just 16% in 2023. The steady 3% annual slide has been blamed on endless digital scrolls, squeezed leisure hours, and spotty library access. Yes, I’ve written about this before, but I’ve since learned that there is one reading subgroup that’s growing.

Die-hard 'super readers', people who devour 20+ books a year, are quietly surging. They’re forming tight-knit crews on Goodreads and seemingly treating reading like a gamified quest, smashing goals of 52–150 titles while the rest of us doomscroll. It's a weirdly polarised picture – we’re in mass retreat from books, but there’s this fervent rebel core doubling down harder than ever.

That pesky Gen Z shoulders some blame for the slump, by the way, despite #BookTok's viral frenzy racking up 107 billion views and sparking 59 million US print sales in 2024 alone. Surveys show young buyers snapping up 2.1 print books monthly – which is more than millennials like me – but actually reading the things is a different story, with nearly half of adults not even managing one book last year. It’s a classic human habit: we hoard more books than we crack open (I know I do…), and #BookTok's aesthetic stacks only amplify the 'buy now, read later' trap.

But if you want to join the elite ranks of super readers, they have some tips. They swear by dedicated slots (bedtime or commutes), juggling multiple books across formats to match moods, quitting boring books quickly, and always having tempting options queued up. Your odds spike if you're a high-earning white woman too – they dominate the ranks at twice the rate of other groups.

2 quotes to keep in mind

1 simple tip for making decisions

Which option leads to the least regret?

Sometimes when making decisions, you get to choose from a list of options that all seem pretty good. It’s hard to decide what you really want, as nothing really strikes you as a hell yes. But if you still have to make a decision - and we often do at many points in life - a simple way of making up your mind is considering which option would lead you to the least regret.

It stops you wasting your time with ‘well, what do I really want?‘ which can be a hurdle. Because sometimes you don’t exactly need to choose what you want most, but rather what you don’t want the least.

This decision-making method was popularised by spaceman and book seller Jeff Bezos. Here he is talking about it, back when he still had some hair:

That's all for today. Many thanks for reading.

Adam

Adam Zulawski
Procrastilearning on Beehiiv / More stuff

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