Monitors
My wife asked “How can you stare at a computer screen all day at work and then come home and stare at it all night?”
I just realized that the real answer to this question is “Because I’m not looking at the screen itself - I’m seeing what I’m reading/writing.”
At work (where I am a tech writer and editor), I’m not seeing the monitor but the words. I’m mentally visualizing what the words are saying/describing, and verifying that what they say is what the author meant and that they make sense. Grammar is the structure I hang the images on, and if it is not correct (provides a false image or fails to integrate with the rest), I can see it and fix it.
Similarly, when I’m writing, I’m not seeing the monitor but the action unfolding in my head as though I was there. I “hear” the dialog in the voices of those speaking (or at least what I think those voices should sound like). The same when I’m reading something online: I don’t see the words, but the scenes the words are describing (or the actual images in the case of a visual presentation, whether a webcomic or video).
How can I stare at a screen all day and all night? I don’t. The screen is just a medium I stare through to see other things. Who’d want to stare at a monitor all day? They’re boring lumps of plastic that do nothing.