Media Tsundoku

積ん読 — The Original Pile

In Japanese, tsundoku (積ん読) refers to the act of acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them. It combines tsumu (to pile up) with doku (to read). The word has been in use since the Meiji era, the late 19th century, and it carries no real judgement. It's not an accusation. It's barely even a confession. It's simply a description of something every reader does.

You walk into a bookshop and leave with three books. You already have seven unread at home. You know this. You buy them anyway. The pile grows. Not because you're lazy or undisciplined, but because you're aspirational. Each book represents a version of yourself you'd like to become. The stack on the nightstand is a portrait of future selves, neatly spined and gathering dust.

Digital Tsundoku

We all do it digitally now. The behaviour hasn't changed, only the medium. Instead of books on a nightstand, it's 47 open browser tabs. Instead of a pile on the floor, it's 200+ bookmarks organised into folders you created with great optimism and have never reopened. Instead of a stack of magazines, it's a Pocket queue stretching back three years, a Substack inbox with 400 unread editions, and a Netflix "My List" that would take several months to watch at a pace of one title per night.

We save with the confidence of someone who believes they'll have infinite time. We won't. But we keep saving anyway. Every "Read Later" tap is a tiny act of faith. Every bookmark is a promise to a future version of ourselves who, we quietly suspect, will also be too busy scrolling to ever come back to it.

The tools have only made it worse. Pocket was supposed to solve the problem — it just gave the pile a cleaner interface. Notion was supposed to organise everything — it became another place for things to accumulate. Read-it-later became read-it-never, and we all quietly accepted that.

The Pile is the Portrait

But here's what's genuinely interesting about all this digital accumulation — your pile is the most honest portrait of your mind that exists. More honest than your social media, which is performative. More honest than your reading list on Goodreads, which is aspirational in a public way. Your bookmarks? Nobody sees those. Your saved Instagram posts? Private. The 47 tabs? That chaos is yours alone.

What you save when nobody's watching reveals what genuinely interests you. Not what you think should interest you, not what looks good to save, but the actual textures of your curiosity. An article about Japanese woodworking. A thread about how fonts shape perception. A recipe you'll never cook. A longread about a sport you don't even follow. A three-part documentary series about a subject you discovered at midnight and forgot by morning.

The pile doesn't lie. It can't. It was never meant to be seen. And that's precisely what makes it valuable — not as content to consume, but as data about who you are. The gap between what you save and what you consume isn't a failure of productivity. It's information. It's the rawest signal of taste you'll ever produce.