Reading Is Now A Superpower

Renaissance Humans, #46

Back in the quaint, halcyon days of 2005, I had a Command Master Chief who thought body weight bench press was the best way to evaluate how good a Frogman you were. He was totally into bench pressing, and he thought everyone else should be as well. If you couldn’t press your body weight 20 times, you were a lesser man. I took no end of harassment because I could only put up a measly nineteen and a half reps.

Of course, said Master Chief wouldn’t be caught dead running the foothills outside our Forward Operating Base near Kandahar, Afghanistan, where I spent most afternoons we weren’t working.

Because of this experience, I am hesitant to point at something I naturally enjoy doing (and do a lot of) as some great thing everyone should do.

I realize if you’re reading these words, you are part of the population inclined to agree with the notion that reading is important for humans, so there’s also a selection bias here.

But it’s hard to look at the following stats, collated by writer Russell Mickler and not conclude a titanic change is occurring:

Fewer people are reading more books: Americans are reading fewer books on average than they did five years ago.

Fewer people are reading at all: The percentage of US adults who read books has declined by 7% over the past decade.

Fewer people are reading long-form fiction: In 2022, only 37.6% of adults reported reading a novel, down from 41.8% in 2017 and 45.2% in 2012.

Fewer people are reading long and complex texts: Adults may be getting less practice reading long and complex texts.

Use cases are changing: Americans spend more time on digital media. In 2022, the average daily time spent on digital media was approximately 8 hours and 14 minutes, accounting for 62.4% of total media consumption. And while digital media consumption is rising, traditional media usage has declined. In 2021, the average daily time spent on traditional media was about 6 hours and 18 minutes, with a continued downward trend observed in subsequent years. The 2024 estimated average daily time spent on digital media is 508 minutes (8 hours and 28 minutes).

This doesn’t even discuss childhood and young adult reading, which is falling off a cliff. The below piece is about incoming students at Colombia University.

Back in October, I wrote that Story isn’t collapsing as we transition to new mediums of communication, but Depth is—our ability to focus, see nuance, and introspect.

Many have noticed this emerging trend.

In The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Nicolas Carr discusses how the internet is reshaping our cognitive processes and diminishing our capacity for deep, focused thinking. He argues the rapid, fragmented information delivery of the internet encourages skimming and multitasking, and weakens our ability to engage in sustained concentration or contemplation.

In Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf delves into the profound changes in how we read and process information in the age of digital media. She draws from neuroscience, psychology, and literacy studies to show how the transition from print to digital screens impacts the brain's deep reading circuitry. This circuitry is essential for empathy, critical thinking, and reflection. Wolf laments the decline of sustained, immersive reading, and warns of its implications for individual and societal development.

Woof.

Reading widely and deeply allows us to synthesize across different subject, domains, and disciplines.

To create John Boyd-Style Snowmobiles.¹

But I am wondering if too much reading, too much analysis, led us down the left hemisphere garden path.² Maybe the decline in reading is just what the doctor ordered to rebalance our brain hemispheres. Get us into our bodies more, moving in space with fellow humans.

Source

However, rather than fostering embodiment, the decline in reading is leading to increased time in virtual echo chambers, alone, fragmented, and disconnected from our fellow humans. Not a good trade, all things considered.

When I say reading is now a superpower, I mean the ability to attend to the written word for hours is no longer commonplace.

It will become an advantage to be able to devote the requisite focus long-form books demand. To aid in critical thinking and deep reflection, so necessary in a world of increasing complexity.

People are still reading, short, punchy “content” via social media.

People are attending to long-form content, in the form of podcasts, so it’s not necessarily an attention span thing.

I am skeptical you retain as much from a podcast as you do from reading—Or reading vice listening to an audio or video essay, for that matter. It’s too frictionless, too easy for your mind to wander if you’re not actively engaged with a text.

There are also differences in retention between reading a physical book and a digital one

Reading is declining inexorably in the face of exciting alternatives in the audio/visual medium.

Is this something we should be content to allow to naturally unfold, Wu-Wei style, or should we fight it?

Should we rage against the dying of the light?

Will we still be able to produce humans capable of maintaining the complexity of the society we’ve created, without the deep engagement long-form reading provides?

I guess we’ll find out.

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Currere Certamen Tuum

1. In John Robb’s words describing Boyd’s vision, “Building a snowmobile is crafting a novel solution to a problem that synthesizes various fully optimized but conceptually unrelated elements into a cohesive whole (motorcycle handlebars + tank treads + skis + boat outboard motor = a vehicle built to traverse snow).”

2. In The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, McGilchrist argues the left and right hemispheres of the brain play distinct and complementary roles in shaping human experience and culture. The right hemisphere, the "Master," is holistic, context-aware, and attuned to the living, interconnected world, while the left hemisphere, the "Emissary," is analytical, reductionist, and focused on manipulation and control. His take is that contemporary society is off balance, too much left hemisphere.