Why Can’t We Read Anymore?

Last year I finished ten books. Not ten a month, not even one each season—just ten in twelve months. And that included a slim novel I inhaled on a flight only because I couldn’t sleep. For someone who has spent her life around words, ten felt pitiful. Once, books were the way I marked time. Summers collapsed into sprawling epics. Whole evenings devoted to a single chapter. Staying up all night on a school-night to finish a paperback. Now, books sit half-read while the hours dissolve into notifications, feeds, and tabs.

It’s not for lack of trying. Most nights, a book is there on the nightstand—paperback, I open it. I start. A page, maybe two. Then the twitch arrives: what if something’s happened in the last six minutes? I check my phone. A message, a headline, a meme, some breaking news about a celebrity divorce. Fifteen minutes later I’m deep into an article about Cold War submarines, and the book lies abandoned. It feels less like I’ve lost interest, more like I’ve betrayed my old self.

The attention economy, perfected

This isn’t simply “phones bad, books good.” It’s more insidious. Technology has been engineered to capture and monetise our attention. Every app, every feed, every notification is a behavioural experiment designed to hook us. Psychologists call it a “variable reward system.” Each time you refresh, you might get something new—an email, a like, breaking news. That “maybe” is what keeps you coming back. The dopamine surge is small but addictive.

Books don’t play that game. They demand patience. They withhold reward until you’ve built context, until you’ve sat with a character long enough to care. Which is precisely why they feel so difficult now. We’re wired to expect immediacy, but novels are exercises in delay.

Reading that isn’t reading

The irony is that we’re not reading less. We’re reading constantly—texts, captions, WhatsApp chains, endless articles we “save for later” and never return to. But this kind of reading is shallow, transactional. Designed to be skimmed, liked, and discarded. It’s reading stripped of depth.

Books are the opposite: slow, layered, resistant to multitasking. They require what psychologists call “deep attention,” the sustained concentration that allows for immersion. Without practice, that skill atrophies. And with it, something else atrophies too: our capacity for empathy, reflection, complexity. If you can’t hold your focus on a chapter, how do you hold it on a difficult idea—or on another person?

What we lose when books lose

Think of the social consequences. A culture that doesn’t read deeply becomes a culture of hot takes. Politics shrinks to slogans, nuance dissolves into outrage, and every issue is flattened into the shortest possible headline. Reading trains us to inhabit ambiguity, to sit with perspectives we don’t immediately agree with, to delay the satisfaction of resolution. Without that training, discourse becomes exactly what it feels like today: frantic, shallow, brittle.

There’s also the matter of memory. Studies suggest that the fragmented, rapid-fire reading we do online doesn’t encode in the brain the way sustained reading does. We scroll endlessly, but how much sticks? Books, by contrast, linger. They become reference points, internal landscapes. Without them, the mind risks becoming as transient as the feeds we consume.

Can we find our way back?

Well, the good news is, that books aren’t going anywhere. They’ve survived every technological upheaval—radio, cinema, television, the internet. The real question isn’t about books; it’s about us. Do we remember how to be readers?

The way back isn’t through productivity hacks or Goodreads challenges. It’s smaller, quieter. A single book, chosen carefully. Ten minutes a night, not an hour. Phone out of reach. A lamp, a chair, a page. The first few minutes will feel stiff, almost punishing. But slowly, the old rhythm returns—the sensation of being carried, the widening of attention, the quiet pleasure of immersion.

Maybe reading today is less about information than resistance. In a world optimised for distraction, to read a book is to reclaim your own mind. It’s to insist that not every minute needs to be monetised, that your attention belongs to you.

If we lose that—if we stop making space for words that demand patience—we risk more than a pile of unread novels.