The Panic About Reading

17 Feb, 2025

I was watching an old video on YouTube to research for a different upcoming post when one of people said something which made my ears perk up. The video was a 1950’s interview with a woman who had depression who talked about being bored with life. The psychiatrist asked what she would do and whether she did any housework (classic 50’s sexism). The patient didn’t do any housework since her brother-in-law whom she was living with had servants (classic 50’s again), so she would usually just sit around and maybe read once in a while. Now this made my brain make a connection which is obvious yet seldom voiced: why would we be reading?

The amount of information being produced the hour I am writing this blog-post is absolutely insane. The estimate by Statista (whose premium service makes it impossible for me to check their sources) is that we create 402 million TB per day. Divided by 24, that is around 17~ million TB of data every hour. Lot’s of this is e-mails and stuff that you wouldn’t have access to anyway, but if even a minority of this are enjoyable experiences you still wouldn’t have a chance of getting to it. We have YouTube-channels whose average video length is 2-4 hours long, video games where the gameplay loop is essentially infinite on a human scale, and more movies and TV-shows to catch up on than you have time in your life. When you catalog all the stuff you want to do, you know deep down that you will never be able to catch up. There is so much stuff it can be kind of sickening.

The backlog is very real and can be built up through the accumulation of information as we go about our daily lives. You get consistent recommendations of new podcasts and albums on Spotify and your still trying to get to that tutorial that teaches you how to speak fluently in Tagalog. Is it time to admit defeat to our backlogs? Are we doomed to have the infinite content machine make our backlogs infinite as well? Ah, the dilemma of our time. To be in the algorithmic internet age is to have exponential information supplies and a dwindling time to experience them. But what does all of this have to do with reading?

Since our senses are bombarded with exciting, and easy to consume stuff tailor-made for us individually, the book is this very antiquated technology. Don’t get me wrong, I love books. I have quite a few. But the phenomenology of reading a book is quite different from what we are used to today. And I won’t even blame us for being impatient (even if some of you definitely are exactly that). The aforementioned idea that there is a lot of information to be siphoned through eventually leads us to strategies of maneuvering this information. We crave stuff, good stuff, since it is essentially given to us for free in these never-ending feeds of garbage. Finding insightful posts, memes, and new subgenres of music expands horizons and I believe can be worthwhile. You do still have off-days where scrolling is the most meaningless thing to do. Books are not really separated from this problem. Thousands of books are produced every year: self-released, academic presses, commercial presses, indie presses, art presses etcetc.. Books are slower, they are clunkier, and they often require maintained concentration.

On the other hand, they can very much provide us with a deeper experience of humanity and the subjects which we engage with. Books like Franz Kafka’s The Trial explores the feelings of powerlessness of a man enmeshed in bureaucracy, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass explores the humanity of a man who embraces his freedom in verse, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex explored the lived experience of what it means to become a woman. All of these books are fascinating in their own right, but they take a long time and often include subtleties which require us to stop and take notes.

Now, does this mean that we actually see lowered reading proficiency among young people? According to the National Center of Education Statistics, the number of 4th, 8th, and 12th graders who’s reading performance is lower than their expected levels are not markedly lower than in 1992. It also doesn’t show any marked difference in amazing readers too. What we do see is that the amount of time spent reading goes down, and like no-shit right? That woman in the 1950’s had smoking cigarettes, being with her friends, and reading as pastimes. Her brain would literally explode at the overwhelming nature of our information landscape. To be bored today is akin to the height of arrogance, but of course we still are. While I wouldn’t say that books are an inferior media, the medium of the written word communicates differently from say a YouTube Short. Young people aren’t idiots because they don’t read. Adults also read less. In fact, we all spend less time reading. Reading just seems to be less attractive than the addictive social media feeds that giant media conglomerates depend on us for [^2]. It’s a shame though, because reading is a phenomenal thing. It’s not that reading makes you smarter, but it makes you wise to how people think, frame, and argue for their positions. These are attractive qualities to have if you work (or desire to work) in any sort of cognitively demanding job.

Which leads us to another topic, namely that reading is and continues to be highly linked to class. If you have parents who read recreationally, it just makes you a lot more likely to read recreationally yourself. Economic class will put a lot of preconditions on the social stratification later in life, especially in rigid class societies like the US. If you have no time to read because you work two jobs and you’re too tired to read after work, it is also quite likely that your kids might not get into the habit of reading. There are of course children who will find gathering information interesting for its own sake, but if the governments of the world think reading is an end in itself then it might actually be more worth it to just get more money into those who have the least instead of investing into public information campaigns. But even if you have money that is no guarantee that you will spend that time reading. In fact, I think a lot of millionaires and billionaires are totally ill equipped to read because they seldom actually need to flex that muscle.

I should actually also note that the panic about reading often totally leaves out that some people are dyslexic and read in different ways. They need large print books or audio books and in this sense are excluded from being readers since they are not “really reading”. To that I think you should call bullshit. If you listen to audiobooks you are consuming the information in a different way, but you are still putting in time to an authors words. I listened to much of Walden by Thoreau (to which Thoreau would’ve likely been pissed) and found it very good as I was going on long nature walks. Reading is not like a television or internet video, which commands your attention. Reading requires quiet and time, which to add to my above point is difficult to get when you live in close quarters. How are you supposed to enjoy poetry if you live in the same room as the television being blared after work? I know I couldn’t do it. If public libraries are funded and maintained you might be able to go there, but it very much depends on how reading friendly your particular area is. Even so, I think that there is value to reading in and of itself. Something you don’t get from television, internet videos, or even AI book summarizers (which I find kind of preposterous).

Gratification is more drawn out and anticipatory with books. Good books, really well-made texts can make you think about very fundamental questions in your life. Is the way we organize society just? Is my self-pity getting in my way? What does it mean to understand something? How does the world even work? Books can also show a reflection of yourself. My favorite books are not the most profound, but those that voiced something I didn’t know about myself or couldn’t word well. I didn’t read Suicide by Eduoard Levé because it was so pleasurable all the time, but because it explained a lassitude and indifference towards life and myself which was hard to express. When I read A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros I experienced myself through the beautiful prose and perspectives of the author. And I have to be honest and say that parts of the book are really difficult and bordering on boring. I would still not choose to be without the highs of these experience. But these experiences are hard to advocate for. A book of essays will necessarily hit differently from a video essay. Many video essayists make thought-provoking stuff, but one shouldn’t underestimate the written word even if our multimedia world is more tempting. The essay To Philosophize is to Learn How to Die by Michel de Montaigne is one of my favorite pieces of literature despite Montaigne’s often meandering comments about Seneca and Horace. I love it because it is fun and shows a different way to think about dying than we are used to.

But reading so often can feel like homework, and it really shouldn’t be. You shouldn’t agonize about your reading time if reading this particular text is a slog. The struggle is real though, and your sunk-cost fallacy brain are making hundreds of excuses for why you shouldn’t drop your reading of Tiqqun. Reading is anticipatory, but sometimes a writer just doesn’t know when to stop yapping. They simply are not the right fit for you.

In that spirit, I’ll leave with some concluding remarks about reading. I think if adults (including me) are to have opinions about the reading habits of young people then they should ask themselves when the last time they read a book, a magazine article, or a denser essay. Because these are what increase reading proficiency. Reading is a muscle and you don’t become a weightlifter by agonizing over the lack of exercise in society. You change hearts and minds by expecting better while understanding that it hurts right now. When I was 13 I read a fantasy book which was catered to teenagers and it was an agonizing experience, but I was expected to present the book for a school-project. It was expected that I read it and could give a synopsis. Today you could do the same with any AI, but if you are in school or university don’t cheat yourself out of the experience of reading. Don’t take that shortcut. I did read the fantasy at 13, but it was also the only book I read for like 5-7 years. When I entered university I was totally unprepared for the challenge. I was really just skirting by the first couple of years as I came totally unprepared to lectures. I could easily have rode through with C’s and D’s and gotten my diploma. But after a while I had a professor who expected me to perform and who supported the journey I made step-by-step into denser and denser material. He understood it was challenging but commended the steps to learn and be passionate about something. He warned me to not lift too much above my weight, but to try and see what I could manage. And I realized that I do love reading, but that the ways I was taught to read or what reading was for had tainted my relationship to it. I believe that young people are smart and desire someone to show them the ropes, but in that case we also have to pick up the slack ourselves and not expect them to know how to tightrope-walk without supervision, or god-forbid that teachers have another thing that is expected of them.

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