We love readers, but we just won’t become them
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Reading is dying, and it’s taking critical thinking, empathy, focus, and imagination down with it.
Our culture is losing sight of the value of knowledge and literacy, embracing instead ideas that are surface-level, puritanical, and uncomplicated. As literacy and reading rates continue their alarming decline, it has become clear just how much more basic our culture has become.
This decline predates the pandemic. According to The Nation’s Report Card, reading scores for fourth and eighth graders have been falling since before 2019, and the 2024 results show fewer than a third of students reading at a proficient level, with roughly 40 percent of fourth graders scoring below even the basic benchmark. According to a Gallup analysis of Department of Education data, more than half of American adults read below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level. And fewer people are choosing to read at all. In 1992, 61 percent of American adults reported reading at least one book for pleasure in the past year. By 2022, that number had fallen to 49 percent, and the share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day has dropped from 28 percent in 2004 to just 16 percent in 2023.
Reading is one of our most powerful tools. It keeps the brain healthy, sharpens focus, and builds knowledge. Neuroscientists at Emory University found that reading a novel produced heightened connectivity in the brain that persisted for days after participants finished the book, benefits that outlast the reading itself. Books do something more than that, though. They generate empathy, they make room for complicated thoughts, and they force you to imagine and build a world outside of your own, and studies consistently link fiction reading to higher empathy. No other medium gives you that much depth. Not condensed summaries, and certainly not social media and AI.
And our culture desperately needs more of this, though the strange thing is that it seems to want it too. Consider Dua Lipa, one of the biggest pop stars in the world. Part of what draws people to her is that she is openly, unapologetically a reader. She founded her own book club, and this summer she opened her own library in Porto, a permanent collection of 100 banned and censored books that school boards and governments have tried to erase.
Florida knows those books well, since our state has led the nation in school book removals for three years running. None of this has cost her cultural relevance; rather, it has deepened it. The appetite for intellectualism is clearly there. We celebrate it when we see it modeled. What we refuse to do is the actual work.
That work matters because we have flattened nearly everything into black and white, when most of life is complex and multifaceted, and reading is one of the only habits that pushes back against that instinct. Spending 300 pages inside another person’s perspective teaches you that people are complicated, that one opinion does not fit all, and that not every question needs a stringent answer. None of this means every opinion is right or valid. It means reading builds the muscle for telling the difference, and that muscle is exactly what a culture allergic to nuance has let atrophy.
BookTok is minting bestsellers, and romantasy is booming, so at a glance, reading culture looks alive. The trouble is that this mistakes a niche for a culture. A corner of the internet passing around the same viral titles can thrive while the average reader disappears. And yes, every generation has panicked about the death of reading, but this moment is different. Television competed with reading for our evenings.
The phone competes for every unclaimed second of the day, and it was engineered to make putting it down feel like a loss.
None of this reverses on its own. We celebrate readers; we romanticize libraries; we applaud a pop star for building a library of banned books, and then we pick the phone back up. Reading will not die quietly on its own shelf. It will take critical thinking, empathy, focus, and imagination down with it, and those are not things a culture gets back by scrolling.
Mckenna Friedland is a Miami resident and a graduate student at Columbia University, pursuing her Master of Social Work, with plans to apply to doctoral programs in psychology after completing her degree.
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