Stair Pits
What happens when a kid who lost the parent lottery grows up to find success — and then decides to write the whole thing down? Stair Pits is the podcast where author R.A. Thompson and co-host Max unpack the stories behind the memoir Stair Pits: a darkly comic look at a childhood gone spectacularly wrong. Expect real talk, sharp humor, hard-won wisdom, and the kind of honest conversation you only get between two people who trust each other. New episodes regularly — grab the book at unbreakableorigins.com.
Stair Pits
We Lost the Ability to Read and Nobody's Talking About It
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Why Reading Feels Hard (And Why That's Exactly the Point)
Reading a full page and absorbing nothing is a weird kind of panic — we've both been there. We call it "the scorpion in the mouth": the strange discomfort of something that demands your full attention when your brain is trained for quick inputs and fast replies.
In this episode, we get honest about why books feel harder than texting, scrolling, or watching a show — and why that difficulty is actually the whole point.
We break down what gets lost when communication moves to a screen (tone, subtext, the ten different meanings of "OK fine"), make the case for novels as a mental gym, and talk about how reading expands your vocabulary beyond good/bad/sucks when you need to explain what's actually going on in your life.
Then we go deeper: imagination, ownership, and why the character you build in your head hits different than the one a film decides for you.
We also cover writing that works for people who hate reading, why short chapters matter, and how small inventions like spacing and punctuation made written language powerful in the first place.
If you've ever said you don't like reading — this one is for you.
👇 Drop your take in the comments: what's the last book that truly pulled you in?
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[00:00:00] Biographies, Novels, And The Scorpion
[00:06:16] Why Reading Feels Hard Now
[00:11:19] Texting Loses Nuance And Subtext
[00:15:04] What Reading Is Really For
[00:22:06] Imagination, Ownership, And Characters
[00:27:56] How We Learn Language By Assimilation
[00:32:36] Vocabulary, Precision, And Better Thinking
[00:46:09] A Book Built For Non Readers
[00:50:11] Charlemagne, Punctuation, And The Close