Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Joy of Reading in the Age of Technology

42% of adults in the US will never read a book again after they graduate college. That’s a truly devastating statistic. The fleeting seductiveness of Instagram lets us envy places and things, but thoughts have been left behind in the last decade. The few times we do post written thought, it’s short. It’s one line of a Snapchat story, or 140 characters, or an Instagram caption that nobody will read beyond the “Read more” barrier. The internet’s echo chamber dispels heterogeneity, ensuring that in the rare case that you do read a book, its populist lowest-common-denominator dribble. A New York Times bestseller. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. Maybe Sapiens. And god forbid it’s more than 250 pages. “How many TV shows could I have binged in that time?” Books are like a Masterchef pantry—an infinite assortment of ingredients to cook any dish hot and fresh, competing with the heroin that is your smartphone. Even the heartiest savory warm sumptuous marina-laden pasta that just hits the spot can’t compare to the needle injected directly into your brain, again and again, with unending supply. Feeling lethargic? Flip out your phone, order some food and simmer on your couch watching one of the ten shows Netflix decides you need to. Feeling active? Flip out your phone and text a couple odd friends and let Google Maps or Uber mechanically guide you to dinner and drinks. Feeling very productive? You spend time becoming fit, to appear marginally more beautiful on the surface under the guise of health. Do anything, but the boring tedium of using your brain. As our attention spans decrease, our chores get easier, and our vanity evolves into superficiality, the slow burn of books has no place in the 21st century.

There may not be any mental biomarkers that expose your dull mind, but don’t let that fool you. We may not be able to measure the dribbling ability of a soccer player but make no mistake, not all of them dribble the same. Today, we struggle with a host of mental health issues: anxiety, insecurity, depression. While it’d be foolish to say reading is a panacea, I’d venture a guess that it sure does help. It sure helped me. Growing up to read about the Hermoines and the Rons and the Harrys that would simultaneously enchanted yet normalize my everyday life. Unlike TV shows like How I Met Your Mother where friends seem to have no jobs, live in New York and constantly hang out and enjoy a drink at a bar, books give freedom to the mundane. In a book, much like in real life, characters don’t always do something. They think, they wonder. In movies, characters react. In books, they feel. While insecurity in a movie might be a two second frown, in a book it can be 20 pages of teaching you how to unpack the emotion. What did he have that I didn’t? Why? And in those one-sided conversations with fictional characters you learn about your own mind. Grief, exuberance, consternation, fear: these are emotions that need to be digested with contemplation, not muzzled with distraction. People around me often turn to meditation as an answer. A few minutes of silent awareness of the breath in the morning. While that might help some, I’d contest that a long novel can achieve better results faster. Forcing yourself to meditate is like quitting drugs cold turkey. Ten minutes of silence ensued by an hour-long TikTok binge isn’t going to help you. Unlike meditation, reading a book doesn’t fight your intrinsic desires, it consumes them. It captures your mind and holds it hostage for hours on end. Once you finish a good book, you can’t help but to read another. An easy, healthy addiction more akin to a sport than a drug.

In the past 6 months, I’ve read many novels. As a former utilitarian devotee of non-fiction, I was disillusioned by non-fiction that did too much tell and not much show. In that time, I’ve felt a noticeable change in the urgency to be busy. I was either doing work, or working out, or socializing, or planning a trip or on a vacation. An empty Saturday afternoon would paralyze my mind with fear, not excitement. Since I’ve been reading, the changes have slowly revealed themselves. I looked forward to reading instead of seeing it as a task. The five minute windows between everyday life were ever so slightly less poisoned by empty scrolling. I began to dream more, and vividly, occasionally forcing myself back to sleep to continue a dream. I felt a resurgence of childlike curiosity seep into other aspects of my life, in conversations with friends or even at work. Because my mind was active and resting on new thoughts and concepts, free time was less exploratory and more exploitative. Instead of scrolling in search of content, I’d delve deeper into concepts my current book was talking about. Like the Queen from Alice in Wonderland, “I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Now, I’m no academic and your anonymous internet lurker-cynics may be quick to be dismissive of my anecdata. To you, I surrender. I will not be able to show you a randomized control trial and publish a double-blind reviewed academic paper in Nature on the topic. But I can tell you this. Of all the elder men and women I’ve ever met, the ones who read always have the sharpest mind and the greatest zest for life. They look back on life with awe, not bitterness. They smile more.

As a technologist and technocrat, I’d be remiss to dismiss the role modern technology can play in amplifying the experience of reading a book. Just like chemistry can extract both the purest poisons and the most sophisticated vaccines, technology can be an addictive drug or a nootropic mind-catalyst. The old school way to read your run-of-the-mill 200 page storybook was to flip through a paperback over a couple of hours buried in the pillows of your living room couch. When it comes to reading textbooks, where retention is an explicit goal, we add highlighters, pencils and perhaps a little notebook to take notes. In the pre-computer era, deep research meant having access to and understanding a complex library cataloging system. The sheer amount of effort and accessibility to do so limited deep research to those taking a university course or the graduate student. Bolstered by the limitless power of the internet, reading today can be a wholly new experience. We have access to new modalities of reading - e-book readers like the kindle, your phone and audiobooks that will read out the text at the speed of your choice. You can look up vocabulary in a single tap. The mere experience of reading can be accentuated with a playlist, sometimes a professionally made one from the film adaptation, or curated by the author themselves. The author’s bio is no longer a one paragraph atrocity on the rear sleeve of a hardcover book, but an endless Wikipedia complete with online interviews, complete bibliography, life story, influences and more. Youtube allows us to see fan art, book reviews, and a litany of interpretations. With podcasts, Google Scholar, Reddit, StackExchange and custom wikis, you can explore endless facts and analyses about your favorite novel in the very comfort of your bedroom, not the ornamental intricacy of a physical library. Hell, even the laziest of readers can at least indulge in film and TV adaptations of many of the books they read today, or choose explicitly to read books that have an adaptation. The joy of reading a book is not a battle against technology, but a sensation that can be profoundly escalated by it.

This essay is not a knowledge-utilitarian case for reading books. It’s a mental health case. Reading a novel demands a prolonged period of active focus of the mind and unlocking of the imagination, much like running a marathon. You needn’t read books for an explicit functional utility, just like you don’t run a marathon to get from point A to point B. I argue that the sheer wonder and joy of reading has lasting effects on your happiness as a being. A hesitation towards reading is a symptom of vanity and technological addiction to short-term payoffs - a smoking habit that needs to be kicked. Yet technology is not unanimously evil, but like a sword that can injure you or assist you. Readers of the 60s would admonish us for not leveraging the technology at our fingertips to heighten the reading experience - tools they would’ve killed for back in the day. The next day you instinctively power up your Netflix and mindlessly scroll to a thumbnail worthy of your puny mammalian brain’s attention, think instead of how you can put your mind on a treadmill instead of a drug. Open up Amazon and buy a $10 paperback work of fiction. It’s cheaper than therapy.

PS: I often get asked as a follow-up: where should I start? I’m not elitist about the greatness of books and am not one to insist you delve into and enjoy the classics. I believe the urge to read must succeed a spark of curiosity. If you haven’t read for a while, I insist on the lower attrition of fiction. Maybe try and read a novel that a movie you like was based on. Maybe use Youtube to find spoiler-free recommendations of the best books and watch a few videos. Me simply saying read Dune isn’t sufficient for you do it.