The Decline of Reading? How to Buck the Trend.

By Glen C. Strathy

Over the past few months, I've seen a number of articles and videos on the decline of reading as a hobby. The topics range from the problem young people (high school and college age) not reading books and not feeling capable of reading books for school to a shrinking reading public to reading becoming mainly a women's hobby (along with complaints that traditional publishers don't publish books of interest to men any more.

It's all very sad.

I like to think that reading utterly changed my life, that it made me the person I am today, without which I would have had a far more impoverished inner life. 

When I was young, I didn't have a parent who encouraged me to excel at school. I didn't learn to read before I was taught in a classroom. But I certainly took to it rapidly. For much of my life, I have been a voracious reader, switching genres every decade or so.

Now that I am older, I realize I was born with a craving for intellectual stimulation. I am drawn to new ideas and stories I can immerse my imagination in. Reading satisfies my need to have new things to think about.

I've also earned a living as a writer, at times.

Of course, there are some likely causes for this decline...

1. A loss of leisure time in general, as adults spend longer hours working in an economy that demands ever more from them even as standards of living stall.

2. More single-parent families today means adults, busy with the demands of both career and parenting, have less time for reading and less time for reading to their children.

3. Competition from other forms of entertainment. Certainly movies and television impacted reading time when they were introduced a century ago. Now reading also competes with video games, streaming, social media, email, AI-chatbots, and other internet-based forms of entertainment. 

4. The deliberate designing of media to be addictive. Much of modern screen-based entertainment and media are engineered to keep you engaged for as long as possible, using a plethora of tactics not available to the average book writer of 200 years ago. In particular, social media and games condition you to expect frequent rewards for brief investments of your time, so you end up spending long hours scrolling rapidly through memes, posts, short videos, etc. -- consuming them in an endless succession -- with each one giving you a quick burst of hormonal stimulation before being quickly forgotten.

In fact, if you spend over three hours a day consuming social media or short-form entertainment, the effect is just like being addicted to slot machines or substances. And the side-effects often include anxiety and depression. Here's one article discussing the phenomenon. 

Longer Works are More Rewarding

I tend to suspect the addictive nature of short media is the biggest factor that has led to the decline of reading. The more time you spend consuming short-form entertainment, the harder it is to focus on a book or novel in which the value unfolds slowly over hundreds of pages, requiring you to remember what you read hours or days earlier. The more you are used to small investments of your time and attention, the harder it is to develop a sense of how all the parts of a long book relate to and build upon each other. 

Long books challenge you to to think deeply and more thoroughly about what you read. The demand you invest longer stretches of time on an argument, a story, or an ensemble of facts. They increase your emotional involvement in a story, whether the story is fiction or nonfiction. Reading books teaches your brain how to think in-depth.

Books lead you to the resolution of a problem slowly. They have a conclusion. Short-form entertainment is designed to never reach a conclusion, to never be satisfying.

Short-form entertainment invites you to not think deeply about anything. The thing you just consumed and got your hit from becomes instantly  irrelevant and not worth thinking any more about, because you've already moved on to the next thing. It's one fast hit of emotion after another with no lasting benefit. 

Because books require more investment, a book you love can change your life in ways a meme never will. It can help you develop ideas and feelings that stay with you for the rest of your life. 

Slower Reading is More Rewarding

I would argue that the more slowly you read a book, the more value you will get out of it. 

Too often, people today skim books rapidly. Sometimes this is necessary, such as when you have to read a lot of material for work or school and you feel too pressed for time to ponder it deeply. 

But pleasure readers as well, trained as we are these days to short-form entertainment with its frequent hits of dopamine, often confess to skimming books. Some skip everything but dialogue. Others listen to audio books at 2X-4X the intended speed. Their need for a quick fix leaves them without enough patience to read properly, opting instead for an abridged, truncated experience that is closer to what they get from short-form entertainment, but lacks the richness of thought and experience books offer. The goal of some of these readers seems to be to consume as many books as possible. Like the habit of eating empty calories, they starve their minds of the most nutritional benefits books can offer.

Reading books too rapidly means you get less pleasure and intellectual value out of each one. Rapid consumption means less time spent thinking and reflecting on what you read. It means less time to absorb and be absorbed in what you read, less opportunity to be affected by it. Reading slowly, thinking slowly, and even speaking slowly is often far more impactful.

(Incidentally, one way to make yourself read slower is to read aloud, which was actually the most common way to read books, once upon a time. In fact, it is still the best way to read poetry.)

Of course, it's your choice what sort of value you are looking to get from reading or other forms of entertainment and communication.

But if you currently spend several hours a day on short-form entertainment or social media, I would challenge you to take break for a week and use the same time to read a book slowly. And not just any book. Choose a book that promises you real value, whether that value comes in the form of emotion, fun, philosophical challenge, escapism, or education. 

(If you haven't read a book slowly for some time, I suspect it will take at least a week to get yourself out of the speed-consume, habit and into a slow-in-depth-read habit. You will have to relearn patience and a different set of rewards.

Or, if you currently spend many hours a week reading, but you tend to speed-read, try reading slower and see what difference it makes. 

And if you have children, is there a way to can encourage them to read more and limit screen time? I don't dare prescribe a specific approach, because I know every parent has their unique situation and challenges. But training children to entertain themselves with books rather than screens may do them a lot of good in the long run. Children who read regularly grow up to be better thinkers. And I would argue that their lives will be more enriched as well. 

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