Hello, baby Marxist here!
Personally mine was reading.
When I was a liberal I loathed reading and found it hard to even read a short article. I rarely researched everything I heard, and as a teenager, I was like every other liberal, getting my news off social media.
Now I make sure to research everything, however, getting into theory is a bit hard. Most of the information I learned about communism was through fellow comrades, because like before, I got my information from other people’s comments.
Currently I’m restoring my motivation for reading by starting small. Reading long comments from comrades helped a lot. I’ve now moved on to reading information from leftist sources without effort, and I’m starting on reading the communist manifesto.
Enough about me, what were your side effects?
I love it with my phone because I can turn the speed way up like 1.8x and spend zero mental energy actually trying to do the visual perception thing.
I can free up my body to hike and get exercise. So I can read faster for longer and enjoy it more while getting exercise. Been doing that everyday with Capital.
Doesn’t work that well with some really technical books which I’m more inclined to sit down with. I got it to work decently with Microbiology of the Cell tho.
Improved my quality of life considerably.