When we stopped reading
A thought struck me the other day.
We talk a lot about the "reading crisis" these days. Fewer people, especially the younger generation, pick up books for pleasure. And it’s not just books – even films are starting to feel too long. We’ve shifted toward shorter and shorter forms: clips, snippets, trailers, TikToks. Content designed to be consumed in seconds. No time to linger.
But here’s what I keep coming back to: fiction, especially the kind we used to read in novels, did something quite special. Something I’m not sure anything else really replicates.
So many of those stories were told in the first person. I saw, I felt, I feared, I loved. And as readers, we were invited into that “I.” We didn't just witness what happened to the character — we became the character, if only for a little while. We saw the world through their eyes. We experienced what they experienced, but also how they interpreted those experiences. And that’s where something subtle and powerful happened.
One time, the narrator might be a woman. Another time, a queer character. Or someone completely outside the norm — a criminal, even — and instead of judging them immediately, we were asked to sit with their story. To understand, if not to condone. To imagine. The more we read, the more perspectives we tried on, like different sets of glasses. And with each one, we became just a little more capable of seeing the world from someone else's point of view.
That, to me, was a kind of education. Not the formal, test-taking kind, but something deeper. A softening of the borders of our identity. A quiet expansion of our ability to relate. This kind of reading didn’t just teach us empathy — it trained us to shift perspectives, to think in layers, to hold contradictions.
And maybe that’s what we’re missing now.
Because something else I notice, more and more, is how rigid we’re becoming. Not just politically, but socially, personally. It’s like there’s less room for ambiguity, for nuance. And I wonder if that’s partly because we’ve moved from participation to observation. Watching films — or worse, clips of films — turns us into spectators. Detached. Commentators from the sidelines, ready with a like or a snarky comment. We interpret, we judge. But we don’t often enter the story anymore.
Sure, there’s always been a portion of the population that never cared much for books or reflection. That’s not new. But what is new is how easy it is now to exist entirely within quick takes and shallow narratives. And when that’s all we consume, we become easier to manipulate. People who’ve never had to stretch their minds to inhabit another perspective are more likely to fall for black-and-white thinking. To attack, without pause, anyone portrayed as “the other.” Because they’ve never been invited — or required — to imagine what it feels like to be that other person.
I’m not saying reading will solve all our problems. But I do think the quiet disappearance of deep, personal storytelling from our daily lives might be playing a bigger role than we realize in the mess we’re in.
Maybe, just maybe, the world started unraveling the moment we stopped reading.