It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/

by 0in • 15 days ago

219 338 15 days ago

sdevonoes• 15 days ago

For me, reading used to be a way to enjoy part of my free time.

Nowadays is still that but it’s also a way to relax. Even though I don’t have accounts in the main social media networks (instagram, fb, twitter, youtube, etc) I still consume them indirectly on a weekly basis (e.g., i like to watch videoclips in YT, a friend sends me a twitter link, etc). It makes me anxious. I’ve realised that consuming in tiny bits (short videos, ads, stories, tweets, private messages, even going to those stores where everything is under $5) doesn’t suit me well, therefore reading regular books for at least 1-2h per day (plus other activities like working out alone, or going for a walk to a park) is becoming essential for my wellbeing.

cphoover2• 15 days ago

I'm afraid I am addicted to short-form video and wish I could go back to spending more of my free-time reading books.

mathgeek2• 15 days ago

Have you also run into the attention deficit effect of all these short forms of media? Overriding my brain's desire to put a book down after a couple pages is certainly not my favorite pastime.

khutorni• 15 days ago

I suggest blocking all platforms that provide short-form video and firmly deciding not to consume such content for a set period of time (e.g., 2 weeks). For me, this is the only way to stop once I fall back into the habit.

Doing this enabled me to spend more time developing and pursuing my own ideas, which is invigorating.

trimbo• 15 days ago

The Brick has been helping me with phone overuse. getbrick.com (I have no association with the company)

On your laptop, route those sites to localhost.

wing-_-nuts4• 15 days ago

It's funny, I signed up for tiktok when I was curious about the hype, explored a bit for the science / history / educational content I normally watch on youtube and found there was almost nothing, and what little there was was of much lower quality.

I deleted my account after about 15m of looking, and hilariously enough, a tiktok researcher reached out, and actually paid me ~ $200 to understand why I bounced off the platform.

api• 15 days ago

Short form video is disturbingly addictive.

I generally refuse to engage with it. A while back I started scrolling some YouTube shorts. Hours later my brain felt fried and… it was hours later? It was kind of shocking and frightening. It felt like I had no memory of the past three hours, like it was a true state of hypnosis.

rvshchwl• 15 days ago

I realized this recently as well, on how much social media has started affected me. I've made some changes to how I use my phone now but haven't seen a lot of improvement overall, basically because I've found that there is "Social Media" everywhere I go. I removed all the Meta apps from my phone and found myself spending more time on LinkedIn. Removed that and I end up on Reddit. I do feel better about not being on FB and Instagram anymore though which I found were the biggest source of my wasted time. I'm not able to fully limit all the apps, and that may just come over time with better habits.

The positive upside to all of this has been that I've been reading more in general. Finished 2 books last month, and almost done with a 3rd one. Not having any of the main apps on my phone just has meant that I end up reaching for a book or something physical to occupy my time, which in general has been a better use of my time.

TrackerFF• 15 days ago

I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.

Reading is definitely a skill that needs to be learned and maintained. Going from reading a couple of hundred words, to even a longer 30 - 60 min article can be tough if you’re out of shape. Same with writing.

It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

yomismoaqui2• 15 days ago

I think that literate people can recover from a period of not reading (books) at all.

I recently had more than a year of not reading any books that was interrupted when I found about The Culture series. I read Use of Weapons and had to read all novels from that universe. After that I tried to find some books similar to them, tried to read some recommended ones (didn't finish any of them) and stopped reading.

In my case reading books is a kind of fever that I get every year or so.

AlotOfReading5• 15 days ago

Unfortunately there really aren't any other books like the culture series. You might enjoy Banks' "The Algebraist" and the completely unrelated though similarly named "The Alchemist".

phil212• 15 days ago

Yeah, reading for me is hot and cold streaks. I’ll read for 3-9mo straight, then go about the same not reading at all. Tends to coincide with life stress and work schedule for the most part, but also just picking up other interests that soak up time!

nearbuy• 15 days ago

The UNESCO/World Bank literacy rate is basically defined how you thought. But high income countries don't usually report this because literacy by this measure is nearly universal. So they often report at higher thresholds (e.g. how many people can read at a grade 9 level), and news headlines often don't make it clear that this is not the same as the UNESCO definition.

dspillett• 15 days ago

It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate,

Under normal circumstances for a healthy human, I'd say no, at least directly. Not a scientific analysis of course, but I don't feel reading ability in a language that you use regularly is going to degrade that significantly. A very similar problem might come about through a drop in attention span which is definitely an issue for many these days, but I wouldn't count this as a literacy problem: the written letters/words/sentences/… are not the issue and other things are going to be equally impacted.

For a second+ language, especially if you never got to a particularly fluent state, this is probably quite different - for anecdata I did pretty well at Spanish GCSE then never spoke a word the 32 years before starting to relearn last year. But again I would not really call this a general literacy problem.

One place where you do see literacy fall precipitously is due to mental degradation due to common complications of old age, if you have relatives with dementia you will have seen this first hand. While literacy is only part of a massive problem here, reading and writing abilities are things that fall away relatively quickly for many (presumably due to them being relatively complex operations, and needing conscious concentration rather than being autonomic life-preserving functions).

pessimizer• 15 days ago

I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum.

It's a very recent redefinition, pushed by people looking to make money from a panic. They're trying to make people who are simply incurious (through stupidity, fear, boredom or whatever) into illiterates. More people are literate than ever before because of the internet. Before the internet, there were an enormous number (up to a quarter of the US population) of actual illiterates.

The new definition of illiteracy is (manipulatively) somehow including people who wouldn't be able to understand something that is being read to them.

I suspect that a lot of middle-class people are illiteracy truthers, because they've never met someone who actually couldn't read. I'm from poor, black, uneducated, working people, and before the internet there were plenty who simply couldn't read. If you asked them to write the word "STOP" they would make a good attempt to copy what they remembered from a stop sign, and draw it like a picture. They're normal people, though, and if you didn't know them well, the strategies that they've developed over a lifetime would keep you from noticing.

It's going to be back again - technology has removed the need to read and write because of voice recognition and interfaces. We're calling it too early.

It makes me wonder if literate people can regress to illiterate, for no other reason than lack of reading maintenance.

I think it's too easy to be exposed to words. To fall into illiteracy through atrophy would be like forgetting Spanish while living in Mexico. The good thing about comprehension-type skills is that they put you into a virtuous circle passively. Once your French gets to a certain point, it takes an effort not to understand French; and every piece of French you fail to fail to understand makes you better at understanding French. If you're in Paris, riding the bus, and somebody is babbling into a cellphone, you'll wish you didn't understand French.

English (like French) is just an absurdly hard language to read and write. Of course there are people who can't, at all. French, although absurd, is probably easier to read than English (though a bit harder to write.)

nozzlegear5• 15 days ago

I was somewhat surprised to find out that illiteracy does not mean that someone needs to be a total (or near) analphabet - but rather that it is a broad and wide spectrum. I always imagined that “teenagers can’t read” meant that they couldn’t read at all, but then I never met such a person.

Indeed, and this is the source of the discrepancy in the reddit-style gotcha that gets repeated about Americans being illiterate. It's not that they can't read, it's that illiteracy (as measured by whichever agency in the US does the measuring) means something more than just "can't read at all."

tolerance3• 15 days ago

A good idea to consider might be what Hans Magnus Enzensberger referred to as "second-order illiteracy".

[The second-order illiterate] has come a long way: his loss of memory causes him no suffering; his lack of will makes life easy for him; he values his inability to concentrate; he considers it an advantage that he neither knows nor understands what is happening to him. He is mobile. He is adaptive. He has a talent for getting things done. We need have no worries about him. It contributes to the second-order illiterate's sense of well-being that he has no idea that he is a second-order illiterate. He considers himself well-informed; he can decipher instructions on appliances and tools; he can decode pictograms and checks. And he moves within an environment hermetically sealed against anything that might infect his consciousness. That he might come to grief in this environment is unthinkable. After all, it produced and educated him in order to guarantee its undisturbed continuation.

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/IN+PRAISE+OF+ILLITERACY.-a062...

senordevnyc7• 15 days ago

What an incredibly off-putting and pretentious way to view what probably constitutes the majority of your fellow humans.

lynndotpy3• 15 days ago

I recently argued with someone in their 60s who argued, in total sincerity, that nobody should ever need to read or write more than 500 words at a time. I asked about Terms of Service agreements, hospital paperwork, etc, and she insisted that it was not a useful skill. I think she might qualify as illiterate.

(For reference, your comment and my reply combined make for about 180 words.)

CrimsonCape• 14 days ago

reading "Terms of Service" is useless if you are not also understanding Terms of Service, and once you understand Terms of Service, you also understand how you are being shafted by signing up to them since 99% of Terms of Service are for their benefit.

I propose a new metric: you feed any terms of Service into an AI that outputs "It will realistically cost you X litigious dollars to win against these terms." That's all the signee really needs to know.

sph• 15 days ago

Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.

What dreadful hyperbole. If reading is in decline, it’s just that we are in a crisis of widespread ignorance and broken education system, but good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read.

The anomaly might in fact be that we are regressing in human general intelligence compared to the rest of history.

criddell3• 15 days ago

good luck navigating through life without knowing how to read

Literacy isn't usually evaluated as a binary thing.

Here's how one organization ranks reading levels:

https://nces.ed.gov/naal/perf_levels.asp

I think the optimists in the article once believed proficiency was inevitable but maybe basic is the best they should hope for now.

Diogenesian2• 15 days ago

Not "the rest of history," but relative to the ~1800-2000 period of steadily increasing literacy and educational attainment.

The European Dark Ages after the fall of Western Rome was a real thing. Many people regressed to the Stone Age for hundreds of years, and we lost almost every written work from ancient Greece and Rome. That can absolutely happen with the US and EU by 2200, especially considering digital information is far more fragile over centuries than papyrus and parchment.

tomwheeler• 15 days ago

[flagged]

functionmouse• 15 days ago

It's true; I also started reading the comments before clicking the article. Show of hands?

notreading26• 15 days ago

Well, you missed this:

Of course, the new republic was not always a haven for sober analysis. The Founding Fathers attacked their enemies in the papers, spreading lies to incite the public against their opponents. One ally of Thomas Jefferson’s called John Adams “a hideous hermaphroditical character which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

RobKohr• 15 days ago

I made it about 15% through the article, but that is a about normal for the Atlantic.

They generally get their point across and then rattle on for more time than I am interested in reading.

Guess I'm part of the post literate world. I also perfer short stories instead of novels.

rTX5CMRXIfFG• 15 days ago

I actually read the article first, but I find it too long, and unnecessarily so. I am a huge proponent of reading, especially for the acquisition of new knowledge and perspectives, but I consider this form of writing rather entitled, beating around the bush and demanding too much of my time and attention just to make a point or two.

tim333• 14 days ago

Yeah pretty much here. I assumed it would be along the lines that reading social media isn't reading and only pretentious novels count.

hagbard_c• 14 days ago

Some jazz hands 'cause I don't want to upset the sensitive Atlantic readership. No, did not read it, did read Clockwork Orange back in high school, still reading every day 42 years later but then I did not attend an Ivy League uni in the 2020's so that probably explains a lot.

cphoover2• 15 days ago

I wonder if someone educated in this could provide the neurological benefits of reading, outside of communication. They are numerous, are they not? Memory, neuroplasticity, focus, stress relief—I'm sure there are many other benefits too.

ashleyn• 15 days ago

I refuse to believe that the decline of our education system is some inevitable, intractable problem.

breezybottom13• 15 days ago

Decline since when? A few hundred years ago most people were illiterate farmers.

bluGill7• 15 days ago

Were they though? Or were they only illiterate because literacy was measured in Latin not their native language? We know that historically that did happen, and it is hard to figure out what was done.

Even today, most talking about literacy rates are using a very high level read skills to make things look bad, when most people can read just fine for the normal level things are written in. I'm near illiterate if you only test me on medical papers.

nozzlegear5• 15 days ago

Within the last 30 years? Last 20? We had a high point, and we're not there any longer – certainly not in my state (Iowa).

wing-_-nuts4• 15 days ago

That merely shows that a very basic education is more widespread. One thing that's always struck me, listening to letters read aloud in history shows, is the eloquence and mastery of the language they possessed.

TLDR: fewer people may have been literate, but the ones who were, were damned good writers.

logicchains2• 15 days ago

Even in the 1800s the literacy rate in the US was over 50% (the highest in the world), because it was founded by "sola scriptura" Protestants for whom Bible reading was a religious duty.

autoexec3• 15 days ago

I'm inclined to believe that the decline of our education system is intentional. Certain people don't want the masses to be capable of critical thinking.

bmacho• 15 days ago

I wholeheartadly believe that new generations can't be forever better in everything than the previous ones. There will come a time of stagnation or even decline.

So there is absolutely nothing wrong in decline. It's mathematically necessary. (Well, stagnation, or slow increase is also possible.)

I also don't think that the only function of the education system is to score higher and higher on tests, it has so many other functions: keep kids happy, turn kids into happy adults, lower the tensions is society, create a better world for everyone, etc.

There wouldn't be much point of scoring better in tests if it resulted in unhappy kids, unhappy adults, broken society, broken world, now would it?

apparent9• 15 days ago

This is not a fair comparison:

Only 38 percent read a novel or short story... The proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023.... Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book: Last year, 57 percent of Americans placed a bet.

It takes much less time to place a bet than to read a novel/short story. Likewise, reading for pleasure "on any given day" is a totally different measure than "placed a bet last year".

saulpw• 15 days ago

Yeah, at least it should be over the same time period!

lapcat11• 15 days ago

Your selective quote left off the part that made it a fairer comparison. "Only 38 read a novel or short story" was a follow-up to "fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022." That's a year-long stat.

apparent9• 15 days ago

Reading an entire book takes much more time than placing an online bet.

lanfeust6• 15 days ago

I read more than ever, but Substack is taking a sizable share of the pie whereas lit and non-fiction is now my late evening. I don't do the audiobook thing, though I understand that has become increasingly popular yet not really given much credence.

Desire might be theoretically limitless, but time and attention is not. Time I spend reading is time I'm not consuming endless short-form videos. People have gotten hooked on phones and the medium dictates what they consume.

There could be boom and bust cycles for this. Trends lose lustre and people are always looking for ways to signal status/competence. It's probably why "booktok" is a thing.

apparent9• 15 days ago

Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.

Shrinking the passages on the SAT from full-page to a few sentences will exacerbate this trend.

giraffe_lady• 15 days ago

I don't think I learned this skill from the sat.

criddell3• 15 days ago

I think the point is that the design of the SAT influences what is taught in schools.

If the SAT stops testing the ability to deal with multi-paragraph text, then schools will spend less time teaching those skills.

joh6nn• 15 days ago

The implication is not that people learned this skill from the SAT, but rather that not requiring it to score well on the SAT further lowers the baseline.

apparent9• 15 days ago

Doing well on the SAT used to require some measure of reading stamina. It no longer does, so some students who would have been prompted to increase their stamina in order to do well on the SAT will no longer feel that pressure.

Aurornis• 15 days ago

For better or worse, testing was used as an assortative matching between students and universities they applied for. Though far from perfect, a university that set their acceptance bar at a certain level could expect incoming students to at least be at or around that level.

The less rigorous the filtering, the more you have to accommodate the lower ends of the incoming students’ abilities. So as standardized testing is softened, so too is the curriculum that students are exposed to.

There is a movement against standardized testing that gained traction in the past decade, arguing that because it’s flawed and imperfect we should abandon it. The movement never had a good replacement for it, though, so the shift was toward looser standards and judging students based on vibes and non-academic measures. Many of the universities that went this direction are reversing course and adding standardized testing back now because the reality of higher education is that you need to filter incoming students by some academic measurements if you want to be able raise the bar for your curriculum.

The effects cascade everywhere. In a perfect utopia everyone would get individualized perfect tutoring and we wouldn’t have to worry about testing, but in the world we inhabit a lot of the education decisions and realities are downstream of what we can test for.

tsunamifury5• 15 days ago

Humans tend to reflexively shift their learning to their environment.

We often judge those changes but we are notoriously bad at consciously predicting the future our collective unconscious often does.

AnimalMuppet• 15 days ago

Hmm. If someone knew the number of graduates from 2017 to 2026, they could estimate what fraction of them could paraphrase and make inferences.

My stab at it: Looks like about 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026. The US population is about 350 million.

20% of 350 million is 70 million, so 70 million people couldn't paraphrase in 2017. 30% is 105 million, so 105 million people couldn't in 2026. That means that of the 36 million high school graduates from 2017 to 2026, only one million of them could paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text?

I know the US educational system is a mess, but I find it hard to believe that it's quite that much of a mess. Can anyone point out flaws in the math?

lubujackson• 15 days ago

That assumes the shift was entirely due to high school students becoming adults. There are also people who haven't read much over those years and have had their skills declined to the point of failure. Or, also likely, sample size issues.

OkayPhysicist• 15 days ago

You're making the assumption that the change in absolute terms is entirely driven by deficient additions to the population. It's just as possible that some portion of the population lost their skill by allowing it to atrophy from underuse.

Izkata3• 14 days ago

Here's how those numbers are plausible: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_cueing

Each of these quotes is from a different part of that Wikipedia page:

It involves guessing the meaning of unfamiliar words based on context clues, as opposed to phonics, the more traditional method of sounding out words.
Three cueing methods have been criticized for misunderstanding how reading is acquired and for potentially damaging children's reading abilities over the long term.
In response to the example of children failing to distinguish between "pony" and "horse", Goodman argued that it was irrelevant whether children understood the specific word, as "pony" and "horse" are similar concepts, and a reader failing to distinguish between them would still understand the meaning of the story as a whole.
Some researchers and educators have attributed part of three cueing's popularity in classrooms to its ease of teaching relative to phonics.
As of 2020, an estimated 75% of American teachers used three cueing.
Over 12 states have explicitly banned educators from teaching three cueing. A lawsuit was filed by families in Massachusetts whose children had been taught three cueing; one of the plaintiffs stated that her son had difficulty reading once classroom materials transitioned into using chapter books.

_doctor_love3• 15 days ago

We were in an age of reading? I gave up about 10 years ago on people as readers. I have recommended so many books and articles to software people over the years and it's honestly depressing how many people have told me they don't like to read.

Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong. More what seems to be the case is people have enjoyed coding as a kind of video game.

But this generalizes to the general population too. Marshall McLuhan's message remains a very important medium.

gosub1002• 15 days ago

I gave up on reading because the authors want to spend a considerable number of pages telling me the color of the buttons on an imaginary character's outfit. They have no such right to waste my time with (or even worse, charge me money for) that.

AlotOfReading5• 15 days ago

No one says "I gave up on eating because restaurants kept serving me spicy food". You just order different food. A short story that's a couple pages long isn't going to waste them describing the color of buttons, and not every novelist is Tolkien.

phyzix5761• 15 days ago

Books have a built in fast-forward feature.

hsuduebc22• 15 days ago

Then maybe you should not read prose. It is about conveying an experience, a story. You might have simply picked a bad author. Personally, I prefer long reads. I understand that some people might not enjoy that style of storytelling, but saying “give up reading” overall is a shame. Try something like Warhammer 40k novels. They are simple, entertaining, and split into shorter parts. What you are describing does not happen there.

GrumpyYoungMan• 15 days ago

"I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong."

It was truer in the 1980s-1990s, when programming was not a prestigious or high paying job and computers were much cruder and required much more skill to get adequate performance from them. Generally, aspiring hackers were very well read people.

There were, of course, corporate programmers doing business programming back then too but they weren't considered hackers and wouldn't even have wanted themselves to be considered hackers.

SoftTalker3• 15 days ago

Progamming in a corporate/business environment was not prestigious or high paying then either. It was a decent job, don't get me wrong, but something more similar to accounting or other back-office work in terms of pay and prestige.

cosmic_cheese• 15 days ago

Given that I have mental bandwidth available, I enjoy a mentally stimulating read (though, the definition of that surely varies between individuals), but people do indeed come into programming from a variety of different angles.

What initially attracted me to programming was the ability it gives one to create. As a kid the idea that a “regular” person like myself could make computer programs — and not just simple CLI toys but full on lovingly crafted, end user friendly complex GUI applications — blew my mind. Programs weren’t like every nearly every other product which only ever came out of some factory that nobody saw themselves.

As such my interest in programming comes with a slant towards practical usability. I don’t do well with abstract concepts without a rock solid grounding real world use case, even though those are intellectual candy for a few subgroups of programmers.

not-kinsale-joe• 15 days ago

Can you recommend me a book to read?

wcarss• 15 days ago

It's difficult to recommend things without knowing a reader's taste, but I blanket recommend The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Stars_My_Destination

wincy• 15 days ago

Theft of Fire is my favorite book in the last ten years for sure.

https://devoneriksen.com/products/theft-of-fire-orbital-spac...

throw48472852• 15 days ago

How about an Elmore Leonard novel? Very digestible novels from a deceptively skilled craftsman.

xpct4• 15 days ago

If you can stomach older English novels: A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

verzali• 15 days ago

What counts as a good book varies from person to person.

But take a look at anything by Asimov. I have a collection of his short stories and it is a nice read. Oh, and any short story collection by Chekhov.

mrweasel3• 15 days ago

Honestly it doesn't matter much, go grab a random book from goodwill. If you do "need" a recommendation, I'd suggest "Roots", I'm reading it now and it's amazingly well written.

One suggestion I would make is to read something from before 1980. No real reason why, but books from 1900 - 1980 work better for me personally, not sure why.

_doctor_love3• 15 days ago

Fiction or non-fiction?

engcoach• 15 days ago

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

akramachamarei• 15 days ago

Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

breezybottom13• 15 days ago

Programming probably is more intellectually stimulating than reading fiction novels.

GPerson• 15 days ago

It’s not.

Novels are fiction by the way.

ksenzee2• 15 days ago

As someone with a degree in literature, I'm gonna disagree there. It depends on both the novel and the programming.

hsuduebc22• 15 days ago

I gave up reading when I got my first portable computer. Not sure why. But after some time I got sick of it and got back to reading and I love it!

For some reason I suddenly got an urge to read long deep fantasy. Storm light archive is perfect for this, I recommend play some fantasy reading music on background. It's a bliss, especially in summer afternoon with cold coffe.

wvenable• 15 days ago

I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

Perhaps the fact that our jobs are intellectual is the problem. I find that at the end of the day I don't have the capacity for intellectual pursuits and I find physical hobbies / activities more relaxing. I suspect the opposite is probably also true.

SkyPuncher2• 15 days ago

I love learning, but I hate reading. Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.

In my view, software development is mostly skimming and pattern recognization. Very little actual, deep reeding in my opinion.

WhrRTheBaboons2• 15 days ago

Most of my learning now is via audio books while I'm doing something else.

You're not actually learning anything then. Memorizing trivia, sure. But not actually learning.

xpct4• 15 days ago

I love learning, but I hate reading.

Correction: you love the feeling of consuming information, not learning.

beej719• 15 days ago

Can I ask why you hate reading? Is this a general statement or is it about the quality of programming-related reading in particular?

inanutshellus• 15 days ago

if you wear yourself out mentally all day as part of your occupation, digging into a "good" book is often too much work.

As anecdata: My wife has a "brainy" occupation and her brilliant sister does not. Correspondingly, my wife has no interest in "brainy" books in her free time whilst her sister is always recommending new 900 page tomes.

senordevnyc7• 15 days ago

I relate to this. My brain is fried after a long day of work, and the last thing I have the energy for is reading something challenging. It’s either light reading, or more often (which I’m a little sad about), watching something.

Kuyawa• 15 days ago

We read, a lot, but not books. We read manuals, get started docs, apis, git repos, AI responses, wikipedia, tik tok comments just for fun, we read constantly and will read till the end of times. That's the way we learn and entertain ourselves, there is no other way around that.

otikik• 15 days ago

You are a programmer? You understand that different firmwares and operative systems work in different ways and excel at different things?

For the record I do like reading. I just don't like all the reading. I tried learning rust by reading the book. Ugh. Horrible for me. Much better experience working on a project of my own. I saw that for some people it worked. Good for them. It didn't for me, and I had to find a different path. I learn by tinkering. Others might learn by copying, or by drawing boxes and arrows. Who am I to judge their firmware?

This is not a bad thing. That's good! Variety in ways of thinking is one of humanity's strengths.

If you find someone who is good at programming but doesn't like reading, try to find out how. You might be able to learn some of their abilities that complement yours.

bartnp• 15 days ago

I have had periods where I mostly gave up on books because I actually rarely found them to be the right level of stimulating. Novels rarely stimulate, or even when they do, it often comes with relatively little learning per unit of time. Meanwhile some books such as advanced physics textbooks can be so overwhelmingly difficult and have so many missing prerequisites that you hit a brick wall in understanding and also learn little.

Now even knowing some great books exist, it can be quite difficult to find those works in the goldilocks zone of being worthwhile while accessible enough. So difficult even that the part where you are searching becomes so time consuming that it still ends up missing the mark on stimulation or learning per hour.

And so generally I find programming or working on other intellectual projects more worthwhile than reading, and reading books has kind of drifted into being a low stimulation activity I do when I'm tired or don't have the focus time for projects.

How do you get around that? How do you find and select what is actually worthwhile to read?

unknownfuture• 15 days ago

Like...you're a programmer? And you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

The rise of vibecoding and the disdain many in the industry hold for the skill of software development should fully disabuse you of any vestiges of this notion...

Every single day, here, on "Hacker" news I see folks describe coding as just a means to an end, and that things like code quality, architecture, etc, don't matter.

Welcome to late stage capitalism, where if you can't immediately monetize it its not worth doing (consider how this might explain the rise of gambling as recreation).

feoren2• 15 days ago

you don't like to read? I assumed that people who enjoy software would be into intellectual stimulation but I've learned that this is wrong.

So HN is OK with being extremely condescending toward others as long as it's a general group of others, not a specific HN user? Just imagine this sentence with almost any other activity:

"You don't like to run? I would have assumed that people who enjoy physical activity would be into real exercise, but I guess they're all actually lazy."

"You don't play an instrument? I would have assumed people who like music would be into creativity, but I guess I was wrong and they're all boring and uncreative."

It is the height of arrogance to assume that people who don't enjoy the same things you like are obviously stupid, lazy losers. And yes, that's absolutely what you are doing in your comment. You seriously cannot imagine any other form of intellectual stimulation that they might be into instead?

_doctor_love3• 14 days ago

Brother, I took a look at your comment history and I think you're projecting.

I also noticed on your profile that you've submitted literally nothing to this site but have made lots of comments, usually negative ones.

To paraphrase Justified: if you met an arrogant person in the morning, you met an arrogant person in the morning. If you meet arrogant people all day...

dtagames2• 14 days ago

Just yesterday, someone on LinkedIn wanted to improve her vibe-coded software, which she plans to charge money for.

I recommended an article of mine with a 34 minute read time. When she saw that in the header, she submitted my article to an AI for summary and complained that she wasn't going to spend 34 minutes (on learning programming).

lp4v4n• 15 days ago

It's been my impression that classic literature is going the same way as painting and other forms of high art.

It was certainly a great display of human intellectual prowess and artistic capacity in bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

smith7018• 15 days ago

Many people still read novels. I live in NYC and see numerous people read books and Kindles every day on the train.

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much

It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series. Stories that used to be told in an hour and a half are now being told in 8 hour-long segments

flenserboy• 15 days ago

which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.

esseph• 15 days ago

It's being replaced with an even longer form of visual media; the mini series

Short form video on YouTube, TikTok, and various AI short form video apps are also spiking in popularity.

uncivilized• 14 days ago

You’ve drawn the wrong conclusion. People still read on the train because there is rarely phone signal when underground. If phones were internet capable during commutes, you’d see a lot less books.

lapcat11• 15 days ago

who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?

Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.

palmotea5• 15 days ago

> who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?
Anyone who has the time and energy to spend on YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter/X, or for that matter, anyone who has the time and energy to spend watching TV.

Most of those are passive entertainments, suitable for people who've been drained of the energy to do anything else.

cjpearson2• 15 days ago

Energy is more difficult to gauge, but the average American has over 5 hours of leisure time daily. When there was more of a time crunch in the past, Americans read more.

vlucas2• 15 days ago

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

Cinema is dying from mostly self-inflicted wounds though. They keep making movies (or re-making movies) with bad writing, bad stories, and unrealistic character development arcs that not many people want to watch.

Good movies have been rewarded in theatres. Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary, etc. all had great box office sales when other movies around them flopped.

areoform• 15 days ago

    Top Gun: Maverick, Obsession, Project Hail Mary

Those movies might be good, but cinema are they not.

Cinema traditionally has meant movies like, À bout de souffle and Citizen Kane.

breezybottom13• 15 days ago

Even accepting that Project Hail Mary, Obsession, and Top Gun are "good movies" (which I completely reject), you're cherry-picking. The top three films of the year are Super Mario Galaxy, Michael, and The Devil Wears Prada 2.

piltdownman• 15 days ago

'Movies' at Blockbuster level pivoted to ersatz carnival rides post-'Pirates of the Caribbean', focusing on safe IPs and simple plots designed to aid comprehension of the major story beats in the SEA markets without the need to resort to subtitles or dubbing.

'True' Cinema has been going from strength to strength the last decade, with even Netflix putting out Fincher spectacles like 'Mank' on streaming, and A24 bringing introducing a new audience to phenomenal Korean Cinema like 'Parasite' and 'Minari'.

Even in the traditional studio system we have been spoilt in recent years by a succession of Palm D'Or and Oscar winners like Anatomy of a Fall, Triangle of Sadness, Zone of Interest, The Brutalist, Oppenheimer and Killers of the Flower Moon.

palmotea5• 15 days ago

bygone times when the world moved at a much slower pace, but who has the time and the energy to read a long novel today?

Capitalism is "fixing the glitch" of workers having space energy. I hope soon we'll achieve the ideal bimodal distribution of labor: work intensified to the point where workers that have the energy for nothing but work, and the impoverished totally unemployed that we can just corral and forget about.

nozzlegear5• 15 days ago

How does this viewpoint account for the times when "capitalism" was, by all objective measures, worse for laborers? I.E. the early industrialization period when laborers worked 14-16 hour days alongside children in factories and mines, risking life and limb?

dash22• 15 days ago

This is one of those very common ideas that cannot survive a ten second encounter with the facts: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever

invalidusernam3• 15 days ago

I think it's mostly due to mobile phones. Most people seem to spend a substantial amount of their free time staring at their phone screen rather than engaging with books or other forms of entertainment. Phones being bite sized entertainment orientated is probably changing the way people feel about longer forms.

ksenzee2• 15 days ago

I read novels voraciously, all of them on my phone. I haven't bought a paper book for myself in maybe a decade.

breezybottom13• 15 days ago

Cinema is dying? Hollywood is on track to have its best year since 2019. Where do people come up with this stuff?

tsunamifury5• 15 days ago

Inflation adjusted outcomes and overall ticket sales down 30-40%

Overall ticket sales Globally are down 46% since 2000.

Please learn to tell financial engineering headlines from reality.

Tade0• 15 days ago

Is that inflation adjusted?

Apparently the peak year for Hollywood was 2002, with $9.2b domestic box office (16.1b inflation adjusted).

surgical_fire• 15 days ago

Even cinema is dying and nobody seems to care that much.

Ever since cinema got reduced to the next Marvel superhero movie, I stopped caring about it.

DeluluDon2• 15 days ago

That's exactly why I'm no longer interested in cinema. When year after year it was some Marvel chuckleknuckle fantasy after the writer's strike it was obvious Hollywood was struggling and had zero imagination anymore.

Even the word 'nerd' got reduced to Trekkie and Star Wars fandom when it used to mean tech enthusiast.

aboardRat42• 15 days ago

Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do.

Most of the news are not worth reading. I listen to news when eating, and I am very glad I don't have to waste my reading span on this crap.

bluGill7• 15 days ago

I wish there was a local news paper around me. There are national news papers with a local edition, but they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.

aboardRat42• 15 days ago

they don't have local reporters digging into local stories and so are not worth reading.

National newspapers don't have reporters digging for stories any more as well. Actually, for many years.

90% of newspapers are buying or reposting their stories from news agencies, such as Bloomberg or Thomson-Reuters.

90% of their activity (in turn) is rewriting press-releases and going to press-conferences of top 500 companies and government bureaus.

In the CIS we have "local telegram channels", but they are mostly run by magistrates' press secretaries, and usually don't report on anything significant, and usually just praise the district prefect and post thinly veiled ads.

wing-_-nuts4• 15 days ago

You're not reading the right news sources then. I find reuters, the AP and such still worthwhile.

quasiperfectus2• 15 days ago

Gambling has become a more common leisure activity than reading a book

I feel like if it took me 20hr to place a bet I'm probably not doing much of that either.

Anecdotal, but my 7y/o loves reading. She's flying through series' and it's getting pricey. I guess she falls in the 16% of people who enjoy it.

apparent9• 15 days ago

Same with my girls (parents of boys seem to mostly have a different experience). Hopefully your kid gets access to digital libraries like Epic or Sora at school. There are also public libraries with ebook lending that can make the habit cheaper.

DeluluDon2• 15 days ago

My mother taught me how to read, I'm male. Incidentally, I scored higher than my peers in reading.

I still read, but it has taken the form of social media which have no more length than a blurb.

sanmarzano2• 15 days ago

It does. People who bet on sports sink hundreds of hours into forums and consuming visual content. Placing a bet takes 30 seconds, deciding what to bet on takes people a very long time. As long as reading a book.

quasiperfectus2• 15 days ago

I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of time people put into researching. A very small minority, sure, but most sports bettors look at the lines and pick.

xmcp1233• 15 days ago

Even as the author points out people are reading more, he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership).

The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.

The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.

I still read books sometimes. It’s a different experience. But it’s only a dumbing down of society, if the things you’re reading are dumb.

Diogenesian2• 15 days ago

The reality is that before, you needed to read huge swaths of information to find/know the relevant information. Now you don’t.
The density of useful information I gather from places like Wikipedia, even long form articles is substantially higher than I got reading non-fiction.

You're in good company. Sam Bankman-Freid:

  I would never read a book. I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. I think, if you wrote a book, you fucked up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.

You do actually need to read huge swaths of information to understand the relevant information. A good nonfiction book isn't long because of low information density: it's because the ideas are so complicated that it takes an entire book to explain it. Your approach is emblematic of a modern trend where people know a bunch of smart factoids but have no broader wisdom or understanding.

Not reading books because of "information denisty" is a lazy rationalization for dumbing yourself down. Wikipedia is good as a quick reference if you already understand something, but a disaster for learning.

breezybottom13• 15 days ago

I've read plenty of scientific articles that read like the author is trying to fulfill a word count. There's definitely something to be said for brevity.

xmcp1233• 15 days ago

I do read huge swaths of information, just directly relevant to the questions that I have, and the things required to understand that information.

Don’t have to read a book on every US president to understand what happened during the Reagan administration. And if I’m primarily interested in the Cold War, I can focus on that subject and skip out on when Reagan was governor of California, or how he met his wife.

More than that I can get information from a variety of sources, including ones that disagree with each other and have different perspectives. That has absolutely enormous value when trying to comprehend something new…and isn’t often available in a single book.

You still can’t be lazy. Laziness is antithetical to truly acquiring knowledge. But it definitely can’t only come from a book.

marcosdumay• 15 days ago

There are very few non-fiction books that actually need their space to communicate their idea, instead of doing it in a chapter and filling the rest of it to reach some word-count target.

Jtsummers3• 15 days ago

he continues to conflate books with reading - and not just that but reading specifically physical books (referring to his stats around book ownership). [emphasis added]

She and her, the author is a woman.

xmcp1233• 15 days ago

Good catch. My apologies. I won’t edit, but just to preserve the accuracy of your correction.

expedition32• 15 days ago

Oh well we had a good run of 5000 years! See you on the next planet.

jdw64• 15 days ago

Books have their advantages, but I don't think you necessarily need to read books—in fact, I think books can sometimes be worse. One strength of books is that their structure, starting with the table of contents, trains you in logical composition.

But books also have drawbacks:

1.If there's incorrect information at the time of writing, it becomes fixed at that point.

2.The author's worldview can become overly authoritative, and the messiness of reality is smoothed over for the sake of a neat narrative.

3.Counterexamples and recent debates are often missing.

There are also bad papers that manipulate data to get results, and books are no different. I think books are not bad for introductory maps and mental training.

If you look at programming books from about 10 years ago, they're like historical relics—hard to apply today.

In a rapidly changing world, if you only read books, you'll easily fall behind. Information is pouring in, and books are static media, slow to adapt. Training yourself to read text is important, but it doesn't have to be through books.

Books help build a mental structure of tables of contents and conceptual sequences, but I question whether that structure can only be formed through books.

And realistically, there's a lot of bad content in books too. Self-help books are full of nonsense and scams that exploit people's desire for success. But they're venerated simply because they come in the form of a 'book.'

What we should venerate is not the 'form of a book,' but the 'way of reading that builds a mental framework.'

So I question whether reading only books is really the right approach. I think of this as 'form over substance.' The core is training logical thinking—that doesn't have to come in the form of a book.

I sometimes think it's worth recalling what Socrates said in Plato's Phaedrus: 'Writing is not a remedy for memory, but a means of making it external, leading to forgetfulness.

Once you write something down, you no longer try to remember it within yourself. You come to trust the external symbols.

Writing doesn't give people true wisdom—it only gives them the appearance of wisdom. What matters is not what's written in a book, but what knowledge you internalize. I don't understand the obsession with the form itself.

logicchains2• 15 days ago

There's a quote from Marcus Aurelius: "Perhaps there are none more lazy, or more truly ignorant, than your everlasting readers". People who just believe whatever they read in books don't actually learn to think, just to regurgitate, and often become out of touch with how the world actually works (although this happens to heavy consumers of any kind of fiction).

microtherion2• 15 days ago

“A Clockwork Orange” as “Old English” is an amusing anecdote, but it might be worth noting that the novel is written in deliberately nonstandard English mixing in Russian words, so it might be nontrivial to read for people lacking interpolation skills.

In the first paragraph, e.g., there is:

There was me, that is Alex, and my three droogs, that is Pete, Georgie, and Dim. Dim being really dim, and we sat in the Korova Milkbar making up our rassoodocks what to do with the evening, a flip dark chill winter bastard though dry.

qingcharles• 15 days ago

Just wait till they open Trainspotting.

microtherion2• 15 days ago

I could handle that, but reached my limit with Feersum Endjinn.

N1ckFG• 15 days ago

It's also New Wave science fiction, and once you get past the conlang and the genre conventions, it's still incredibly violent! Kubrick iirc even once said in an interview that he removed some book scenes from his (initially X-rated) film adaptation, because he thought the invented language helped make them less disturbing to read, but audiences watching them dramatized would just give up and walk out. Anyway I sure do see some of the trends described in the article with my younger students and relatives, but such a strange unforced error makes me suspicious of the strength of the research.

dominotw2• 15 days ago

i got xelink ereader few months ago and i've been reading a ton more. i have all sorts of kindle but i stopped reading but xelink attached to my phone got me back.

I would love a phone where this is a standard feature. dont care about fancy cameras and stuff.

beej719• 15 days ago

I couldn't attach my xteink to my phone because of a standoff around the camera on my phone case. I just now realized that the standoff could be removed and now the magnet works! :)

Did you install Crosspoint on it? I absolutely recommend it.

For reading on my phone Moon Reader is my go-to.

dominotw2• 15 days ago

i want to but it came with usba charing cable pogo pin

bell-cot• 15 days ago

Whether or not people are reading long or complex works for pleasure - what does this trend do to hiring for jobs which require serious comprehension of long, complex documents?

Will we see in-person-only "interviews", where candidates drop their smart phones & glasses into a box, spend hours reading documents, then have to answer questions about 'em?

frwrfwrfeefwf• 15 days ago

to put it politely it's demographic changes

melvillain• 15 days ago

Are you reading this? Consider yourself a reader. I quit reading The Atlantic a decade ago due to their hot takes. Slate and Salon a decade before that. If you read Reddit and romance, you’re literate.

Jerry ”I read,” Elaine “Books, Jerry. Books.”

gowld• 15 days ago

Written communication serves separable purposes:

* Replicating speech, Archiving speech, and separating the acts of speaking and listening from each other. There are alternatives to written format.

* Speech that can be edited easily, until it is perfected.

* Speech that be sped up, slowed down, and jumped around with random access and search.

* Silent speech.

These features can be achieved with alternative technologies.

Written communication also has drawbacks. It is a lossy compression of spoken speech.

ranprieur• 15 days ago

Reading is declining because of computers, which are a much more fragile and dependent technology than text on paper.

snarfy• 15 days ago

I read non-fiction all day long. I'm sure you do too. Even as a kid I was never really interested in fiction. I'd rather read the encyclopedia.

beej719• 15 days ago

I know there are a number of us who read encyclopedias over our breakfast cereal as kids. Ours were World Book.

abrowne• 15 days ago

Was your bookshelf stained from sliding them out? Ours was all red on the bottom edge.

lynndotpy3• 15 days ago

This is a nit-pick, and I agree with the long arc of this article. (And it is very well-written, to boot). But, on this phenomenon,

Last year’s top-selling novel was Sunrise on the Reaping, the latest in the Hunger Games young-adult series. Brian Bannon, the chief librarian at the New York Public Library, told me that young-adult fiction is one of the library’s most popular offerings—including among decidedly not-young adults.

I wonder to what extent this can be attributed to decades-long release windows for some of these novels. I find myself alienated by the dominance of simple and childrens media among my age group peers, but I read Eragon as a child, kept up with the series, and have the 2023 release in the Eragon series on my books-to-read list. The Hunger Games started in 2008; I couldn't bemoan someone who was captivated at 13 then for enjoying the occasional release in 2025.

ButlerianJihad• 15 days ago

The United States has made literacy into a Holy Grail of education, and our systems have reduced illiteracy levels to record lows. However, in the real world, there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all, and for thousands of years there were all kinds of workers who were never required to achieve literacy at all. So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.

Even if the foregoing is completely false and abhorrent to you, we must also come to terms with a "new literacy" in terms of ideograms and emoji. I am learning how to type emoji, and replace many textual expressions with singular emoji and symbols. Computers and electronic devices, as well as our own garments, are frequently labeled with ideograms that transcend human language, but must be interpreted for proper use.

I have noticed some people around me who aren't really good at reading at all, and this is a real handicap to them when paperwork, and computer readouts, and just signs posted all over, are full of words, and our world surrounds us in words to read and comprehend, and if we can't read at lightning-speed levels, and comprehend what we read, we find ourselves at distinct evolutionary/legal/financial/social disadvantages.

So I contend that future literacy will increasingly involve non-English emoji and symbology, and that not every human in the world needs to be literate in a particular written language, and while a majority of society can afford such an education, nothing of value may be lost.

Planktonne3• 15 days ago

there are so many basic jobs, unskilled labor jobs, that should not require literacy at all
So there may be a lot of wasted investment in education trying to make people literate when it's not actually required.

Our society doesn't warrant its own existence if the only considered criterion is how much value we can extract from each other.

tolerance3• 15 days ago

Long read. But this has been known for over 20 years.

Reading has always been associated with education and more generally with urban social elites. Although contemporary commentators deplore the decline of “the reading habit” or “literary reading,” historically the era of mass reading, which lasted from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century in northwestern Europe and North America, was the anomaly.

"Reading and the Reading Class in the Twenty-First Century"

https://sociology.northwestern.edu/documents/faculty-docs/fa...

madhacker• 15 days ago

very long winded this article

ramijames2• 15 days ago

My kids are active, voracious readers. At least one book (500-700 pages) a week. It feels like one of the only things that I've really done right as a parent.

dash22• 15 days ago

How did you do it?

pastage• 15 days ago

Make it joyful

Read books yourself

Make book an important part of your life

Read to the kids

Teach them to read early

Little to no phone use early on

mercutio2• 15 days ago

This is one of those questions non-parents ask.

Kids come out as a person, with strong opinions and desires. You can shave off some rough edges, and maybe bend a few branches of their experience.

But if you present a kid with the opportunity to read, and they read, you can’t take much credit. That’s just who they are. Others are given the opportunity and don’t.

You can fail to provide the opportunity, but after that, it’s pretty much up to the kid.

As a life long reader, on my own, and to my kid, including many a night time baby -> toddler -> easy chapter -> harder chapter read, my kid doesn’t read books. Certainly competent to do so, but just doesn’t. Possibly we could have continued to deny access to Netflix until later (it was 1 hour a week until about 10). No YouTube allowed. Still, didn’t read. Other kids do, and I’m jealous.

ramijames2• 15 days ago

We read to them from a very young age, and kept doing it. They are 13, 11, and 7 now and we still read books together every night for the littlest one, and most nights for the older two. My wife loves doing it and finds that it is solid bonding time.

We also instilled in them that it's a good thing for people to do on their own, and have slowly been providing them guidance on what "good literature" is by providing a constant stream of recommendations. We let them choose whatever they want, of course, and don't for anything on them. They are in total control.

Beyond that, we've taught them that the library is a nice place to just hang out. It's quiet, safe, and theirs as much as anybody else's. We are stuck living in a tiny apartment in a city in the US, and for them being able to just go to the library and have time to themselves is a positive for everyone.

Lastly, we've tried to give them a sense that language itself is fun and beautiful. Lots of word games. Lots of learning weird, esoteric words that nobody else seems to know. They get a kick out of it and so do we.

Izkata3• 14 days ago

I learned to read younger than most, and could read well, but never really liked it. My parents tried the things in the other replies you got, but none of it actually worked (reading to me in particular my mom is convinced did it, but she never realized I was mostly ignoring her and watching other kids play).

I actually remember specifically what it was: finding this book in the impulse-buy section of our local Walgreens when waiting at the checkout line at about 9 or 10 years old: https://animorphs.fandom.com/wiki/The_Forgotten

For some reason I was big into animals, so that cover really caught my eye. Up until that point I knew almost nothing about sci-fi, so this and the rest of the series was basically my introduction to the genre, which is still the majority of what I read.

So my basic advice is a bit vague but: find a book on a topic they'd like, with a relevant cover, and somehow position it so they discover it and curiosity takes over. Don't push it on them, they'll probably just assume it's something you like instead of something they'd like (which was the case for almost everything before I discovered sci-fi).

beej719• 15 days ago

GenX here... I thought this was a great read. I still hope for a young rebellion against the forces the presented in the article. And the author does point out some reasons to hope.

Personally, I read and write every day. I usually have 2-3 books I'm going through at any one time.

I've noticed that on long-haul flights, the movies typically hold no interest and I just read for hours—what a luxury to have nothing else to do!

We gave away our TV. The shows were just less compelling, we found. We don't miss it.

I feel like we tried to catch the wave, and almost did, but we were unable. It rolled out from under us and now we're floating once again in the calm sea beyond.

I have Moonreader installed on my phone, so I can reach for a book any time. This morning I was hypothesizing that since I use my phone for reading books, I'm fooling my brain into that association and maybe that's helpful in consuming long-form content online...?

I also read paper books, a Kobo, my computer, and an Xteink x4. Really anything, I guess!

That hardest part is knowing that more has been written than I will ever have time to enjoy.

bluetrain• 15 days ago

No offense, but this comes off as incredibly smug... Glad you're able to find the time to read and write every day, but not not everyone has that luxury.

adamtaylor_13• 15 days ago

Are you sincerely suggesting, as you write a digital comment on Hacker News, that some people don't have 10-15 minutes in their day to read or write?

Who are these people? Why do they not have the same 24 hours you and I do?

beej719• 15 days ago

It's true that I'm in a place of privilege in the world. But it's amazing how much time gets freed up of one doesn't watch TV or read social media. Like the numbers show, it's hours per day.

I sympathize with people who truly do not have the time, but that's different from most people who simply choose not to spend their time reading or writing.

hypertexthero• 13 days ago

Ditto!

Love reading and writing on paper, but do read and write quite a bit on computer screens, too. Phone screens are too small and uncomfortable for me.

No TV at home, either. And even videogames, which I love, have held less and less interest unless they have good coop modes, an unusual mechanic, or excellent sound and story.

Leaning more and more towards playing music, which has felt like a present from the gods.

Having read McLuhan — https://archive.org/details/bwb_P8-ASW-848 — and Lanier (You Are Not A Gadget), I worry about the future, but am hopeful young people will indeed rebel.

everdrive• 15 days ago

You would be surprised just how quickly you can re-learn the focus to enjoy long-form writing and novels. Much like exercise, don't let your ego get in the way. Find something you enjoy, even if it's a bit trash, and just make it a habit. Like with everything you do regularly, your brain will get better at it, the habit will become more automatic, and you'll find yourself wanting to read more, and more often. It's very much not too late to turn the ship around on an individual level.

taeric3• 15 days ago

To add to this, it isn't "doing it bad" if you aren't out there reading deep texts. Just as it isn't "doing it badly" if you can't run a 4 minute mile.

As you say, you get better at what you are doing. If you want to get faster, at anything, you don't really have the option of skipping the slow phase.

eudamoniac3• 15 days ago

But it's also important to realize that it is "doing it bad" if you are hoping to run a 4 minute mile but your only training is slowly walking around the block forever. At some point you have to seek out more substantial books. You can't just continually read pulp fiction and think you're going to improve at anything; you have to progress.

Spartan-S63• 15 days ago

I took a long break from reading for enjoyment after I graduated from college. I got burnt out from reading things I didn't enjoy in high school and undergrad. Now it's what I do to wind down my day before bed. It's a nice relaxing activity that allows my imagination to run a little.

birdsongs• 15 days ago

Absolutely. I used to read constantly, from my teenage years through my early 30's, but stopped about 5 years ago? I guess life stress and short form social media taking my free time.

But I managed to get free of all the apps, and I jumped back in by re-reading some books from my childhood (Sword of Shannara, some bad 60's/70's sci fi, etc), and really enjoyed them. It was enough to shake me out of my lull and now I have an active queue again.

My commute and mornings are so much better than scrolling instagram on the train.

wuliwong4• 15 days ago

I never read Sword of Shannara but my brother did. It is a nostalgic title for me. :)

johnnyanmac• 15 days ago

Like many joys in life, I simply had less time to enjoy it as I instead spend hours a day reading news, job apps, and technical documents. I read plenty, but not any fiction for recreation.

wuliwong4• 15 days ago

I did this in the last couple years, I used an 'atomic habits' kinda approach. I put a book on the back of the toilet and pledged to read 1 page before looking at my phone. It worked out nicely, I've read a bunch of books over the last year or so after kicking it off in that way.

I am also not a lifelong reader, I didn't start reading until college. My girlfriend read a ton and the first Lord of the Rings movie was about to come out, I got caught up in the excitement and read all the books. Ever since then, I've read pretty steadily. Interesting though, it wasn't social media or anything that slowed my reading to a trickle, it was audiobooks. I freakin love them when the narrator is good. Anyway, that's how I got back to reading and now I haven't listened to an audiobook in a while. :)

strix_varius• 15 days ago

Some of the statistics in the article included audiobooks as reading. It seems like they must trigger at least a subset of the qualities of reading (like maintaining an imagined environment, parsing sentences and paragraphs into meaning, etc)

analog83742• 15 days ago

when you spend long times focusing your attention upon that whole reading process it tends to stick. Like a drug with long-term effects. Do you want those effects?

smcg3• 15 days ago

This is very difficult with our notification-based lifestyles. Either I allow myself to be interrupted or I come back to missed messages and calls.

fridder• 15 days ago

Royalroad has been a great place for me

ffsm8• 15 days ago

What's also massively undervalued is medium high dosage of the amino acid creatine. If you take >10g/day you'll have a much easier time staying focused over long periods. It becomes noticeable only after consistent intake however, and only if you actually pay attention to it - as you won't feel any different. (And it's effect is also supposedly diminished with high Coffein intake)

saidmukhamad• 15 days ago

Also it's not late for first time learners to get the love for reading and question things, just matter of a focus, will and discipline, as it's for any field human would want to tackle

etrautmann• 15 days ago

Is this real? I spend plenty of time online but have no problem still reading books. I don’t know anyone else who stopped reading books either. I’m 41 so maybe this affects people who grew up with social media but I can’t quite tell how hyperbolic the descriptions of the problem are.

specproc2• 15 days ago

42 and frayed. Lifelong reader who really has to remind himself constantly to read.

It's my greatest pleasure and a great source of pride, but God, do my electronic devices interfere.

quotemstr2• 15 days ago

> London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.
The researchers quoted students’ attempts to parse the passage. “So it’s like, um, the mud was all in the streets, and we were, no … so everything’s been, like, kind of washed around and we might find Megalosaurus bones but he says they’re waddling, um, all up the hill,” one student said. At least a quarter of the subjects interpreted the figures of speech literally, leading to the inference that dinosaurs walked the streets of 19th-century London.

It's less that we've forgotten to read and more that technology has made maintaining the historical pretense of mass intellectualism non-viable. The mass bulk of humanity has always been this stupid. Curiosity, epistemic discipline, critical thinking, and counterfactual evaluation have always been the privilege and burden of a few. We've only pretended otherwise to flatter our sense of fair-mindedness, which itself is sparsely distributed among the primate biomass of humanity.

Reality punishes you for refusing to model it properly. A non-predictive theory is worthless. An anti-predictive theory is a hazard. Let's remediate the epistemic toxic waste that is the idea that everyone is capable of the highest level of thought if only properly trained. If you're out in public, look around. A good chunk of the people you see can't understand, having had breakfast, that if they hadn't, they'd be hungry. When you're selected into an environment of concentrated rigor, you lose track of just how dumb most people are. The article is sad yet unsurprising.

Planktonne3• 15 days ago

The issue with this stance is that it folds under immediate scrutiny. It posits that there are intellectually-capable elites and dull, leaden-eyed masses, and uses literacy levels as evidence of that.

Except the people our society views as intellectual elites can't read that well. Every tech billionaire demonstrates a fatal lack of meaningful literacy, and everyone who shares your opinion disqualifies themselves. It's a running joke [1].

Either our elites aren't that elite, and we should ignore their vicious misanthropy, or they are, but their evidence is faulty (and so we should ignore their vicious misanthropy). More succinctly, Preacher points out that the people with the strongest superiority complexes tend to be the worst examples of the relevant trait [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torment_Nexus

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/comicbooks/comments/guckwf/life_imi...

quotemstr2• 15 days ago

Intellectual and economic accomplishment aren't exactly parallel vectors, but you can't expect me to believe they're orthogonal. A mediocre tech CEO is going to run intellectual circles around some random guy you pick out of the DMV ticket queue.

And, yes, some people are smarter than others. Some people are a lot smarter than others. Also, smart people are rare. Very smart people are very rare. These are basic facts of life that continue to exist whether or not you believe in them. Ignore them at your own risk.

4er_transform• 15 days ago

Who cares about reading? Take a step back - humans don’t exist to read, reading is a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another. If we can do that with more information-dense, less lossy methods, all the better.

Lamenting the end of reading is like lamenting the end of manual farm work: the goal isn’t to work in fields, it’s to harvest. We found ways to harvest more than ever for less effort and time than ever, let’s celebrate it.

nxc18• 15 days ago

If you can’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can’t think.

Depending on your place in the class hierarchy, and the orientation of your moral compass, this may or may not be a good thing.

squidbeak• 15 days ago

Culture is "a tool, a means to an end. It’s to transmit information from one to another"?

nothal• 15 days ago

Half joke: If I had to bet, I would guess that reading will exist for as long as civilization does.

More seriously: I am less certain that it will exist in its current form (mass media, publishing houses, etc), but I am certain that textual information will be a standard means of communication and that people will read it. I do think that computer-assisted cognition (including computer-assisted reading) are eventualities at this point. This sort of thing fundamentally challenges the concept of reading: is your brain (by computer-assistance) scanning a hard drive reading? Even though it's alien to us now, I think the answer is yes.

avalys• 15 days ago

What method do you suggest is more information-dense and less lossy?

What people are lamenting is that reading is being replaced with less information-dense, less accurate, less effective mechanisms, like Tiktok shorts and TV news.

wing-_-nuts4• 15 days ago

I'm trying really hard not to be judgemental about this...

Until we invent some sort of matrixesq knowledge transfer, the printed word is hands down the best technology we have to transfer knowledge from one human to another. If a student finishes their education, and is so uncomfortable with reading that they never read another book, we have failed them.

Images / Video can be useful to convey something which is hard to describe in words, but books give an author the ability to dive in much deeper depth on a subject than a video ever could.

coolThingsFirst• 15 days ago

What an imbecillic thing to say and shamelessly glossed with some autistic idea of maximizing info throughout.

Prose is an art form, reading 100 years of solitude is not the same as reading the news.

bkandel• 15 days ago

Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.)

Has the author read A Clockwork Orange? It is filled with made-up "slang" that's basically just Russian. Needing some help to understand that is totally reasonable to me -- I definitely looked up a bunch of the words when I read it!

ogogmad• 15 days ago

Wow. That went over the heads of both a Harvard student and an Atlantic journalist.

smcg3• 15 days ago

Give me an A... A! Give me an A... A! Welcome to Harvard!

shimman3• 15 days ago

Yeah, this is definitely a massive slight. If it was any other book I'd buy it, but when you read terms like "horrorshow," or "platty", or "droogs" in the first few paragraphs it's not hard to see why one would look up words.

Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?

There has to be a phrase for journalists that a conclusion ready in hand but their work is just finding scant/nonexistent evidence proving such a conclusion.

Something like "parallel construction" for law enforcement.

Jtsummers3• 15 days ago

Also who describes "A Clockwork Orange" as old english?

Presumably the confused student who sought out a translation.

dag100• 15 days ago

Could the student really not infer the meanings of those words from context? I don't think Burgess expected his readers to have a working knowledge of Russian.

Brian_K_White3• 15 days ago

The whole point of the line is to show that it was not in fact old english. That's why they wrote the line that way.

You were supposed to read that final disclosure part as a punchline which puts the students complaint into it's proper context of being ridiculous.

Instead you took it at face value and agree with the flummoxed student that it is totally unreasonable to be expected to deduce what droog meant from context.

No one ever needed those words to be translated. I promise I am no genius. I am here wasting time with comments like this on HN instead of literally anything better.

vincent-manis• 15 days ago

Burgess reputedly disliked the American edition's inclusion of a glossary. I'm in partial agreement with that.The right way to read it is to let the language flow over you, and you gradually start making sense of it. The glossary is useful in demonstrating how brilliantly constructed the Nadsat language is, especially the words derived from Russian: horrorshow from khorosho, good; lewdies from lyudi, people; and starry from starei, old.

I disagree with much of Burgess's politics,but his use of language was masterful.

amanaplanacanal3• 15 days ago

Quite a bit of my favorite sci fi is written like that. If you stop to try and figure out exactly what every sentence means, you are missing the experience and probably won't finish.

cheschire• 15 days ago

Trainspotting was like this for me.

Brian_K_White3• 15 days ago

I didn't and don't know Russian and never even thought to try to look up anything like that.

The setting is a fictious future time and place. It's supposed to have words and other things that are different from your normal life.

I just assumed droogs and everything else were just made-up words and got their obvious meanings from context.

It's definitely not a neutral thing that a kid thinks that they way to deal with this is to see if chatgpt can translate it for them.

There will always be those people though so I don't know if it's an alarming facet of a whole population, or just the depressing but mundane fact that that has really always been most people. Still a bad thing, just maybe not a new or abnormal thing.

Or neither. Maybe it's not most people all along but it's certainly some percentage of people all along, and maybe that kid was just one of them that always has and always will exist, and nothing remarkable about it.

specproc2• 15 days ago

I was around fourteen when I read A Clockwork Orange and worked it out fine. I think the author's point stands.

tekla2• 15 days ago

A large point of being literate is that you can pick up context clues to figure out what some word might mean.

And yes that includes slang.

SoftTalker3• 15 days ago

I read all day, every day. I read email. I read news. I read HN.

I don't read books though. I've probably read one novel in the past five years. I used to read more books, newspapers, and magazines and can't really say why I don't anymore other than the news and magazine content is all online now, and it just doesn't seem like there is time left in the day to sit down with a book.

underlipton• 15 days ago

If you want people to read, you have to be willing to accept a population that does not feel harassed and hurried. You have to give them a raise when they say they can't afford shelter and food. You have to stop gatekeeping education as a scarce credential rather than giving it freely as a public good. You have to build systems that allow them to access their needs without movement or seeking help being difficult or even a death trap. You have to rein in the forces that wish to monopolize their attention.

People read when they feel secure. We don't live in a particularly secure society.

Arubis• 15 days ago

Ursula K. Le Guin on this in 2008: https://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/staying-awake/

jjk1663• 15 days ago

https://xkcd.com/1227/

azerix• 15 days ago

It's very telling about myself that the length of the article troubled me... I really gotta read more ffs (if I had the time)

(then again, if I have the time to write an unnecessary comment, then I also have the time to read something)

analog83742• 15 days ago

that and the middle class

trashb• 15 days ago

  And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before.

This sentence undermines the whole article.

People do read more than ever. But we don't recognize it as such. We read on our phone while intermittently reading subtitles of Netflix in the background. We read every time we look at a computer, phone, advertisement etc. But we only count reading paper as "real reading".

The shape of reading is changing yes. I think the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea. Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online. In some way losing this kind of stigma will make reading more accessible.

Writing and publishing is dying first. And that has to go long before reading dies anyway.

fellowniusmonk• 15 days ago

Some random thoughts:

It is very odd, I do more deep reading then ever before but its curated through llms.

I do the exploration then the dive on papers.

Many novels we love were released as serials.

I haven't gotten stuck trying to understand an idea because its poorly explained in a book in a while.

I think humans have been very inefficient at finding gaps in logical progression in explanations because anyone who already knows it subconsciously skips steps in the explanation.

That said, llms, woof. Still so much misunderstood.

switchbak2• 15 days ago

"the "deep" thinking associated with reading has always been a bit of an elitist idea" - precisely. This is all about massaging the categories such that consuming or producing a given type of media in a particular style is "good" and everything else is inadequate.

So if I read a bunch of tech manuals, I'm not a reader because it's not fine literature?

What if I read them as PDFs? What if I print them? Where's the line?

I think we ought to call it something other than simply "reading", because the author seems to be leveraging the dual-meaning of that word to make their point more strongly. But "consuming literature for enjoyment" doesn't come off quite as spicy as pretending that others that don't are illiterate.

babelfish• 15 days ago

Why would reading 1000 words of a great philosopher be any different from reading 1000 words of smut online

Agree that we should work on reducing the stigma around reading (which, incidentally, feels ridiculous to type); but very clearly one of these exercises your mind and one doesn't. People should want to learn things!

switchbak2• 15 days ago

That's mostly a value judgement though.

What about fiction vs non-fiction? Travel vs escapism? This is hugely subjective, and very personal. What one person finds educational could be a navel gazing time wasting pursuit to someone else.

wayeq• 15 days ago

Social media and nearly all news articles covering the past decade or so have made me want to forget how to read entirely.

gwbas1c• 15 days ago

The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.

Uhm, what about Facebook, web-based news articles, and internet message boards? What about video games that involve significant reading?

The above statement is just so biased about what reading is, that I discarded the article as alarmist!

Just because someone isn't reading what you want them to, doesn't make them illiterate.

FumblingBear• 15 days ago

One thing that helped my friends and I really enjoy reading again is book clubs! Since the start of Covid, I've personally run ~3 books clubs with different people where we all vote on a book together, set a pace (usually a few chapters a week), and a time to meet weekly on discord and then discuss.

It's been a great way to solidify friendships, broaden my interests (Not every book that's been voted on was one I'd have picked alone), and cultivate a habit of reading and enjoying meaningful time with people.

I highly recommend anybody with friends who might be interested to reach out and give it a shot! It's been a delight! I've even branched off into hosting a movie club now with the same idea, just pick a movie weekly and watch it asynchronously, then hop on a call to discuss :)

DamnInteresting• 15 days ago

As a non-fiction author, I find myself reading a lot of non-leisure material for research--books, old newspapers, and that sort of thing. A few years ago I noticed that my leisure reading was on the decline, so I decided to delete all of the social media, news, and gaming apps from my phone, and replace them with an e-reader app.

Now, when I have a few idle moments away from my computer, instead of checking something like reddit, I read a few pages from a book. It's great, I recommend it! I'm back to reading a couple of novels per month, and I don't have so much of that queasy wasted-time feeling that social media tends to give me. I've even learned how to pause reading mid-paragraph and resume easily later; that part took some practice.

eudamoniac3• 15 days ago

I would like to argue against the common opinion that Reading Is Good. I don't believe that reading pulp is good in any way. I don't believe that reading an airport novel is any better than watching TV.

Books have the potential to better the mind, but they don't do so simply by being written words. The books must be of a certain artistic caliber. The push to get people reading in general cannot be the end goal. The end goal is to get people to read quality books, to better the mind, affirm life, practice empathy, experience pathos, feel the grace of God. Too many forget this is the end goal and just think reading words on paper is somehow intrinsically a noble endeavor.

I think the common advice to get people into books is wrong and misses the point. "Find a fun trashy book and just read it" is maybe not productive advice unless attention rehabilitation is needed. Sure, some of those people might eventually stumble upon a good book, but advice can be much more efficient than that.

Here's what I would recommend to a burgeoning reader: There are many easy and fun books that have artistic merit; read those. Find them via Booktok lists from pretentious looking people, or common school reading lists, or wherever; generally only read things you have heard of or that you saw on a list somewhere; don't randomly pick off the shelf. Teenager classics like 1984, Book of the New Sun, Kafka on the Shore, American Psycho, Lord of the Rings are fun and easy reads that have meat on the bone. Ignore the airport novel and anything published recently. The average book has the same lack of value as the average TV show, just less entertaining, more boring, and more effortful to experience. Why would you waste time and effort consuming boring, less entertaining media when the phone and the TV are right there? But when you find good books, there is no replacement; you are doing an entirely different thing than mindlessly entertaining yourself. That is what we're trying to do.

zjp• 15 days ago

It's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.

1970-01-01• 15 days ago

This "age of reading" is clickbait.

woopah• 15 days ago

I also see the decline of reading, at least more "serious" long-form works, partly as an extension of the cult of productivity. Why read a 300 page book on something when you can get 75% of the main points in a 30s TikTok video? What's the point of "beautiful" language if it makes the sentence twice as long? I once had a coworker refer to Washington's farewell address as "deprecated" English, and he wasn't interested in reading it at all unless it was compressed down to an easily digestible structure.

Similar to the sentiments expressed in the article, I do think something is lost when your mind is no longer allowed to wander before getting "to the point," but it's hard to articulate this loss clearly without reaching for vague justifications like "aesthetics". However, I also don't think we should force our kids just to read for the sake of reading; I think there should be some intrinsic desire to read a well-articulated sentence, whether it be from books or articles or even Twitter, and it's the seeming lack of that desire which is sad to see.

blightful• 15 days ago

A few years ago I realized I hardly read books any longer. I maybe read a few books a year. I made an effort to start reading and read around 50 a year for a few years. That has dropped quite a bit the past year or two. It definitely took me a while to gain back my ability to focus on reading and I feel I am regressing again. I built a decent home library so have plenty to read but the desire comes and goes. I tried branching out into graphic novels and some have managed to hold my interest. Also some philosophy and psychology books. Lately nothing has really drawn me in though. In the past browsing a used book store or library usually had me getting interested in something different so I might do that soon. Also asking my family and friends for their favorite books.

mortsnort• 15 days ago

Is this reading specific? It feels like just about every activity that is not social media is in decline. I keep reading that streaming TV services are losing users to Tik Tok and YouTube. People can't even be bothered to watch TV.

bitlax3• 15 days ago

"You're in Plato's cave but everyone is bed rotting."

browski• 13 days ago

Education is too obsessed with reading.

It's passive cognitive copy paste.

Writing seems way more important. Requires reading and establishing one's own voice.

But writing in school (at least the district my ex worked for) is focused on boring research essays. There's little if any time spent fostering creative writing.

kderbyma• 13 days ago

The Atlantic.....mouthpiece of the globalist hegemonies and military oligarchs.....

right.... yeah....thanks for nothing

It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history

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