Professors, employers, parents, and even frequenters of social media are all saying the same thing.

It seems like absolutely no one reads anything anymore.

Complaining about novel reading habits, particularly of youth, is hardly a novel phenomenon.

It is about as old as written language itself.

Seneca the Younger, of Ancient Rome, once allegedly grew frustrated with the growing practice of skim reading. He complained, “to be everywhere is to be nowhere.”

With the advent of the printing press, scholars often complained that there were now too many books— that the gates being removed from the garden of knowledge filled it beyond its capacity for usefulness.

What would they have thought of Wikipedia?

Moving on to the 19th century, even the creation of the newspaper itself was looked upon as a villain. Periodicals were viewed as an assault on attention span itself.

As if the ability to read itself were “TikToking” down.

No one has ever been happy with how people are reading.

However, it is worth admitting that this time is different.

Past critics lamented the overall quality of reading.

These days, many people do not engage with reading daily in a meaningful way– in any way, shape or form.

They might read texts or relentlessly doom-scroll social media.

But they are not reading books. Novels. The classics. Or even traditional print media.

In the 2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, only 48.5% of adults reported reading at least one book— with only 37.6% of adults having read a fiction book.

It seems as if more people carry novels than genuinely read them.

Frankly, that might partially explain why language online has evolved how it has— to be rudimentary, simple and often phonetic.

A problem of a different scale

The current literacy crisis, while it may echo with past woes, is a new beast altogether.

In 1955, one might expect a factory worker to read something in the morning with their coffee from cover to cover before clocking in to build Chevy Impalas when they used to weigh something.

Seriously. This was not remotely uncommon.

It was, in fact, quite typical.

Per Pew Research, approximately 63.3 million newspapers were in circulation every weekday in 1984. In 2022, the total is less than a third of that.

20.9 million.

Combining digital and print.

Polite reminder. The population increased by about 100 million people in that period.

People point to many individual crises, but frankly that increasingly seems to be an unfair assessment.

The Icarus rise (and fall) of cable television, the lightning bolt up of social media, news streaming at one’s fingertips 24/7, the kids being raised on iPads instead of dad cracking open a book.

Initiatives have been attempted around the globe.

Test scores might rise back up here.

Basic literacy rates might climb back up a touch there.

But one dark constant remains a unifying force of the race in the 21st century.

People are not reading for pleasure— not switching to a lighter medium, not going from the fiction section to the non-fiction aisle, not even committing the grand heinous sin of skim reading.

The black mirror

The tradition of using a black mirror for scrying dates to the ancient Aztecs. Priests and leaders would use these polished pieces of volcanic-obsidian rock to see that which is obscured by the fog of uncertainty. This tradition was brought back to the Old World by Spanish explorers– exactly which one and brought back to whom is a topic of contentious debate.

What is very well documented is that their use in the Western Occult was popularized by John Dee, a scientific adviser to England’s Elizabeth I. Their use remained shockingly in vogue among the esoterically minded for centuries.

With the advent of the transistor and computing, the mirror truly learned to talk back.

When this technology was in its infancy, the mirrors consumed buildings. Then they were smaller. Just rooms. Then broom closets. Entertainment centers. Desks.

Finally, in a more powerful and all-knowing form than ever, the mirror slimmed down to a size that could fit in even the slimmest of pant pockets of the average consumer.

But the fad-diet slim down of technology is not the driving force behind the death of attention span.

It is a vehicle. They have always simply been vessels for communication and knowing the unknown.

Limited real estate

Reading, like many other mental tasks, is shown to create fatigue in the brain as it is performed.

It is a documented drain of willpower.

Willpower that is also taxed by countless other tasks as they attack the attention span.

Willpower in people is documented as a limited psychological resource that must be replenished with self-care and rest.

The death of reading faces a murderer with hands-stained red.

The algorithm. The iPhone. A never-ending legion of clips, all shorter than a bathroom break.

There are even less obvious pressures unique to the modern era burning gas out of the tanks meant to read books. Forces one simply does not consider.

Off-the-clock work emails have become such a pervasive menace that they are not only the punchline of jokes– but various states and regulatory bodies have made attempts to legislate them.

And how can a book compete with a summoning ritual?

It is a mirror that gets you dates, a dark reflection that your boss yells at you through, an all-seeing eye, algorithmically engineered to want the most of your time as possible.

Welp. I hope you know a good author.

A bleak conclusion

Some scholars have arrived at the conclusion that the postwar drive for adult literacy was an unusual social phenomenon. The decline in reading still leaves the average reader so much higher than the historical means that to be concerned about its decrease is to sweat petty details.

This neglects possible bleaker realities.

Historically, as human technology has advanced, it has been used to replace tasks that are considered mundane and without joy. And hard.

Reading and writing, when removing reading and writing for pleasure, is hard. When only battling tasks and not engaging in joy, it can be a cruel medium.

For the first time in the epic poem of the species, technology exists that can perform most of the essentials of reading and writing.

Just without joy.

Literally with no soul.

And that is exactly why it is the human responsibility to read, to write and to do that which is hard.