More people can read today than at any point in human history. Books are cheaper, more accessible, and more algorithmically curated than ever before. By every quantitative measure, we're living through a golden age of literacy.
The quality of what we're reading, however, tells a different story.
Walk into any bookstore and the front tables mirror your social media feed: glittering paperbacks promising enemies-to-lovers redemption arcs, trauma healing through romance, titles that read like emotional Mad Libs. The bestseller charts reveal a literary monoculture where depth has been systematically replaced by dopamine hits, and books function more as lifestyle accessories than instruments of transformation.
We're reading more than ever. We're also becoming demonstrably worse at thinking.
The Great Reading Delusion
Somewhere in the last decade, we embraced a dangerous premise: that reading—any reading at all—constitutes inherent virtue. That moving your eyes across words, regardless of their content or complexity, automatically makes you better informed, more empathetic, more intellectually sophisticated.
This assumption has become so embedded in our cultural consciousness that questioning it feels almost heretical. We photograph book stacks for social validation. We gamify reading on platforms like Goodreads as if volume equals wisdom. We've convinced ourselves that binge-reading fantasy romance, crime thrillers, and get-rich-quick business books is somehow more edifying than binge-watching Netflix.
This assumption has become so embedded in our cultural consciousness that questioning it feels almost heretical.
The uncomfortable truth is that not all reading is created equal. Some books expand your capacity for complex thought. Others simply provide elaborate methods of intellectual avoidance. The distinction matters more than we're willing to admit.
When Books Were Weapons
I'm not advocating for literary elitism. My own path to serious reading began late and reluctantly—I found most books tedious as a child, and formal education didn't help. But through the deliberate discomfort of engaging with challenging texts, I discovered something our culture seems determined to forget: books are meant to change you, not merely entertain you.
I'm not advocating for literary elitism. My own path to serious reading began late and reluctantly—I found most books tedious as a child, and formal education didn't help.
There was a time when books were genuinely dangerous. They launched revolutions, preserved inconvenient truths, created empathy across impossible divides. Frederick Douglass learned to read and recognized his own humanity. Lincoln absorbed literature and grasped the American experiment's contradictions. These weren't recreational activities—they were acts of intellectual courage.
Books functioned as cathedrals: sacred spaces that demanded reverence, patience, and transformation.
Now we treat them like escape rooms—brief diversions designed for immediate gratification. The "comfort read" has become literature's dominant mode: predictable narratives featuring resilient heroes and heroines, emotional catharsis on schedule, just enough spice to feel transgressive. It's literary dessert, and dessert serves a purpose.
But when dessert becomes your entire intellectual diet, malnutrition follows. When reading becomes nothing more than sophisticated self-soothing—a calibrated dose of validation and closure—we develop what can only be called cognitive diabetes.
When reading becomes nothing more than sophisticated self-soothing—a calibrated dose of validation and closure—we develop what can only be called cognitive diabetes.
The Algorithm of Intellectual Decline
Reading used to require exploration. You wandered library stacks or bookstore aisles, gravitating toward the unfamiliar, the challenging, the potentially uncomfortable. Uncertainty was the point—you didn't know what you needed to read until you encountered it.
Digital platforms have eliminated this productive friction. TikTok, Goodreads, and Amazon don't guide us toward intellectual challenge—they optimize for engagement, which means feeding us refined versions of what we already consume. The algorithm learns your preferences and doubles down: more romantasy, more self-help, more crime thrillers, more trauma-healing-through-spice, more six-word titles about attractive people with supernatural problems.
This feedback loop operates invisibly. You don't notice your reading world contracting until you attempt to leave it. But that narrowing doesn't just affect your bookshelf—it fundamentally alters your cognitive architecture.
What we read shapes what we can understand. When our literary consumption becomes homogeneous, our thinking follows suit. We lose intellectual empathy—the ability to engage seriously with ideas that unsettle us. We stop arguing with complex positions and start canceling them. We cease wrestling with ambiguity and begin scrolling past it.
A society that reads only what confirms its existing beliefs isn't preparing for growth. It's rehearsing decline.
The Resistance
Can this trajectory be reversed? Yes, but not through reading more of the same comfortable material. Not by adding another cozy fantasy series to your annual goal. The solution requires choosing intellectual resistance over emotional comfort, remembering that books are supposed to transform rather than merely reflect us.
We need to make reading difficult again. Not inaccessible or elitist—simply challenging enough to matter. Books should function like resistance training: they're meant to strengthen your capacity for complex thought, not provide frictionless consumption.
We need to make reading difficult again. Not inaccessible or elitist—simply challenging enough to matter.
This means reading material that slows you down, confuses you, forces you to grapple with ideas you'd prefer to dismiss. It means asking what's true rather than what's trending. It means treating intellectual discomfort as a feature, not a bug.
The stakes are higher than personal development. If we continue on our current path, we're cultivating a generation that mistakes consuming two hundred nearly identical romance novels for intellectual sophistication. That's not a reading problem—it's a civilizational one.
What Follows…
This essay opens a longer examination of our contemporary reading crisis. Future pieces will explore how genre fiction became identity politics, how social media platforms accidentally became the publishing industry's editorial board, and why America's most popular books are producing emotional dependency while eroding intellectual capacity.
But the conversation won't end with diagnosis. The goal is practical rehabilitation: retraining our attention, rebuilding genuine curiosity, and remembering that literature's highest purpose isn't to make us feel seen—it's to change us entirely.
Subscribe if this mission appeals to you. Read widely, read critically, and above all, read books that resist you. Our collective intelligence depends on it.
This absolutely smacks of privilege. As a former teacher there can be so many barriers to people picking up a book for the first time and sometimes, these “easy reads” are the hook that can get them started, and they aren’t easy to all people! What can be a challenging read for some is very different to what might be a challenging read for someone with a completely different upbringing. This kind of attitude can really turn people off reading or even scare them from even trying it in the first place because they’re worried they’re not reading “good enough” books.
I’m amazed by the article, I hardly ever find someone who is willing to look critically at what reading is now for many people.
Reading is perhaps the most important part of my life, and I’m always looking for something new, something that makes my brain think. I loathe the new trend that many writers follow, with books that are written only to be sold.
The article is beautifully written and I find myself agreeing with every point.