How I Learned to Read Again

How I Learned to Read Again by Magazine Non Grata

One was love. Being with a partner meant, essentially, turning over my inner life to the partner. Reading seemed like a way of distancing rather than connecting, and by far the better way to consume content was to stream TV shows together.

A wonderful read. I found myself nodding along as I read about the adversaries of reading. I went through the same cycle, though my best reading year was my last year at college.

The Social Dilemma probably was the decisive event for me and made me realize the extent to which my behavior—the regular checking of my cell phone—was addiction, no matter that I was probably a bit better than most people I knew.

Same. And finally,

The question then becomes—and I do find myself asking it a lot—why I bother at all. Why do I read, if it’s not particularly good for my career or my social life, or even for my writing, and I often don’t even enjoy it, and have to find these inane tricks to compel myself to do it? What I’d like to say is that somewhere in me is the same compulsive curiosity that first animated me to become such a great reader back when I was a little kid, but I think the answer is a bit different and is more about feeling a kind of obligation. Civilization is facing an existential crisis. We have lost the habit of reading—if I had such a difficult time with digital addiction, I can only imagine what it was like for people who didn’t have the head start as a reader that I did—and that means that we lose both a capacity for deep concentration (which includes the capacity for jumping from our perspective to perceiving the world from the consciousness of others) as well as a critical continuity with the pre-digital past. These are really bad habits to lose.