For whatever reason, reading as a pastime doesn’t seem to elicit side-eye or shame like playing video games or watching TV does. Reading is just as much of an escape from the real world as screens are, and as an avid reader, I often wonder, what am I trying to escape? I wonder if I spend too much time consuming words rather than living life. I spent most of my walk yesterday interrogating what it is that I want to distract myself from.

The counterpart of that distraction from reality is attention to what I’m reading. I read a story the other day, “Many Worlds” by Ayşegül Savaş, that I can’t stop thinking about. In it, three characters talk about a lot of heady things. Lots of deep, philosophical conversations about life and living. Yet, only one of the characters, Aleksi, lives his life in the ways they talk about — “doing things that interest him and somehow making it work” — while for the other two, Defne and Mete, the talk is just talk, performed for the thrill of feeling cool, thought exercises that result in no real change. Later, after Aleksi has dropped out of their lives with no warning, Mete remembers fondly, after a party with hipster suburbanites where the talk is of homemade kombucha:

“I just remembered how the three of us would hang out and have those epic conversations. We’d talk about so many things that mattered, you know, rather than fermented drinks.”

Characters like Aleksi, or Janice MacLeod of Paris Letters who quits her job and spends two years wandering Europe, inspire me. They actually do the thing they say they want to do. They break out of the trappings of social norms, of making money to sustain a certain kind of life, of comforts that may be comforts or they may be chains.

I haven’t done anything drastic like these characters have done. I haven’t given up my house or my job or my belongings to pursue a different kind of life. But I admire them deeply, and they inspire me to take baby steps. In Paris Letters, MacLeod spends a year purging all of her possessions, to get herself down to a backpack. I’m not going that far, but my husband and I did clear out a bunch of stuff in the early part of this year to simplify our lives. Our ultimate ambition is to make it easy to pick up and go.

I guess this is how I make myself feel okay about all the reading: does it inspire me? Does it change me in some way? I know entertainment for entertainment’s sake has its own value, I don’t want to discount that. But I also want to be cautious: I don’t want to mistake living through other people’s stories for living my own life. I’d like to be brave enough to make big changes all at once, but I think it’s also okay to make small ones as inspiration strikes.