During the witch trials and the Holocaust, they burned the books first. They always burn the books first. In our modern society, books are no longer being burned, but rather, are being banned, and even more unsettling: The reading rates of adults (and children) are dropping significantly each year. This form of censorship conceals information and lowers the risk of cultural, religious, and political opposition — it’s a tactic to dumb us down, to make us more compliant. Even if you do read, or want to, books are now competing with online content and algorithmic engineering that hooks us within an instant. And this is by design. This new form of “book burning” — i.e. the use of modern technology and our intense addiction to it — encourages us to be distracted, numbed, and minimized. More importantly, it makes us easier to control, leaving us powerless to believe in the possibility of a new world. It is not by accident that our society doesn’t read. If we did, we might revolt.
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” – Ray Bradbury
Printed words on shavings of trees don’t compare to the dopamine hit our brains get while moving our thumbs across a shiny black screen. Adults are glued to their phones, raising children that are glued to their iPads. In some ways, people have never read more. News is 24 hours, tweets go out every second, Instagram captions tell us what to feel and what to buy, YouTube encourages us to watch vlogs of other people’s lives distracting us from our own, and TikTok’s alarmingly additive algorithm numbs us until we are barely there. We have never ever had more access to information. But what are we really consuming? Is any of it valuable? Is any of what we’re “reading” making us more knowledgeable? In an attention economy, what are we giving our attention to? Are we confusing information for wisdom?
Unemployed people read more. To me, this is proof that we have overworked our society into pure exhaustion. Any potential free time we have, away from work, we’re plugging in (literally) — not to ourselves or each other — but to an endless maze of pointless information, noise, click bait, and consumerism. Our phones are synonymous with distraction and consumption. People not reading benefits the empire of capitalism. When we’re too tired to read, too tired to (un)learn, the system remains in place. Kris Jenner may work hard, but late capitalism works harder.
“You’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress).” – Ismatu Gwendolyn
We are losing our wisdom. We are losing our culture. We are losing our minds. Drew Gilpin Faust, former president of Harvard University, wrote a fascinating article for The Atlantic about what she observed in her tenure at the Ivy League institution: Gen-Z doesn’t know how to read cursive. They have to have handwritten text “translated” — it’s a language, a technology, they don’t comprehend. The ability to read cursive may seem insignificant in our current modern world, but Faust claims this deprives our society of direct access to its own past. “Only a select few people will be able to translate and report history,” she writes. What she says is also true about history being stored on the internet: It can easily be altered or hidden. “We are losing a connection, and thereby disempowering ourselves,” she continues. And the exact same thing can be said about the ability to read, beyond cursive.
“The important task of literature is to free man.” – Anais Nin
Books and libraries have been targeted by endless groups for thousands of years. As readers in the free world, we are being targeted in a different way — our attention is an immensely valuable commodity, and it’s under attack. The value of our attention? $853 billion in 2023 alone, according to Forbes. In a hyper digital world, we have to be hyper aware of our own participation. Technology isn't inherently wrong, but our brains are being digitally rewired to become paralyzed. Substack writer
says our brains do not retain knowledge from short and long form content in the same way we do with books. And I agree. I can barely remember the last ten videos I saw on TikTok, but I can elaborately describe what I learned from the last four books I read. Though there are many different ways one learns, ones I don’t want to discredit, the information we are consuming through screens does not compare to the wisdom we find in books.Consuming literature is important for this exact reason: It allows us to slow down in a (too) fast-paced world. It allows us to learn about the past, another world even, and this shapes our views of the future. It forces us into action, into thinking, into a different belief of what’s possible. More importantly, it doesn’t allow one entity (like the news or government) to have power over us. We are losing the skill (and patience) of allowing our brains to read, and this impacts us and our children. As philosopher Naval Ravikant says, reading is an investment — for ourselves and our collective future. In other words, reading is the revolution. Or perhaps, how we start.
Every time you put your phone down, to pick up a book, if merely to read a paragraph or a page, consider it an act of rebellion.
A NOTE ON READING TRAUMA
If you haven’t already, please go read
’s piece about reading. It’s fantastic. One thing she touches on is the idea of reading trauma. She says our adult relationship to reading is a direct result of our experiences as a child. “Reading is a site of trauma your body holds onto,” she claims, and I feel her statement in every bone of my body.I grew up loving to read. Roald Dahl was my favorite author. Over time, I stopped reading for pleasure. Reading became synonymous with the high school English teacher I hated. She was old, bitter, cold, and utterly uninspiring. Mostly, she made me feel dumb. At home, I was forced to read when I didn’t want to, about topics I had zero interest in. Reading became interchangeable with punishment and authority. My relationship with reading, once an innocent, genuine desire, suddenly became tainted, complicated — non-existent without force or demand from a parent or teacher.
When I stopped reading, I internalized beliefs around my own intellect — books were for smart people, not me. I never considered the parental, scholarly, nor societal trauma that occured, and how it so dramatically changed the way I felt about myself and the thing I once so loved.
“Life-transforming ideas have always come to me through books.” – Bell Hooks
It took me ten years to heal my relationship with reading (it is a skill after all — the more you read, the easier it is to read), and another ten years to build the library of my dreams. My library is a compilation of spiritual wisdom and matriarchal histories. They’ve helped change who I believed I could be, and what I believe the world can be. They are my most valuable possessions. When I die, the most important thing I will leave behind for my daughter, is not the memory of me, but the possibility of what she may find in the wisdom of these books.
JOURNAL QUESTIONS
What is your current relationship with reading?
If you stopped reading, when did this happen?
Describe a memory around reading as punishment.
What stands in the way of you picking up a book?
If you have kids, do they have a relationship with reading?
EVENT REMINDER
Last event reminder for this upcoming Saturday at 9am PST. We will be exploring the Institution of Motherhood together (read all about it here). I’ll send out an email to paid subscribers on Friday with the zoom link deets!
once again, I clicked the notification to read as soon as I saw (which speaks what you wrote about being plugged in 24/7). But as an editor at a publishing company and someone who is passionate about books and libraries, I could talk about this topic forever.
Social media and internet scrolling has maybe made me feel more “informed” but my critical thinking has taken a huge hit. I find myself relying on comment sections to see if what I think about a video is confirmed in the comments, and when it’s not I’m tempted to change my own thoughts. Books and reading really are an act of rebellion against the dumbing down of myself. Thanks for the reminder Alex.
Ok ok - this piece should be published and spread far and wide. You are bang on.