We live in a paradoxical age. On the surface, it appears to be the most literate era in human history. Words stream across our screens all day long—on phones, tablets, signs, and captions. Language has never been so visible. And yet, beneath this surface lies a quieter, more troubling truth: fewer and fewer people truly read. Not just the act of scanning lines of text, but the deeper kind of reading—the kind that slows the mind, deepens perception, expands empathy, and demands our presence.
What we are witnessing is not simply a decline in literacy rates, though those are falling too. What we are witnessing is something more subtle, more insidious: a diminishing of the inner life. As reading becomes rarer, so too does self-awareness. Thought, once cultivated in long hours of silent reflection, now flits from one novelty to the next. We are forgetting how to dwell with ourselves, how to trace the contours of meaning, how to listen not only to others, but to the deeper movements of our own minds.
This forgetting is not a sudden collapse. It is a slow erosion—difficult to notice precisely because it moves beneath the noise. The transformation has been cultural, technological, educational, and deeply personal. With every year, we see fewer people able—or willing—to sit with a book for hours and emerge changed. The costs of this transformation are difficult to overstate.
Reading, in the truest sense, is not about the transfer of information. It is a spiritual and ethical discipline. To read well is to open oneself to another’s inner world. It is to allow one’s attention to be held—not hijacked, as so often happens with screens, but guided, deepened, and refined. Reading fosters attentiveness, patience, and humility. It demands that we suspend the need for quick conclusions, for constant stimulation, for the immediate gratification of our preferences. It teaches us how to wait. And in that waiting, something shifts. A space opens within, and from that space, new ways of seeing the world begin to emerge.
This capacity for inner spaciousness, this slow unfolding of thought and feeling, has been the foundation of reflective life for centuries. In ancient China, Confucian thinkers like Wang Yangming emphasized the cultivation of the self through what he called liangzhi—innate moral knowing. One does not become virtuous by memorizing facts but by deepening awareness of what is already latent within the heart-mind. Reading was one of the ways to activate that awareness. It was not simply an academic exercise—it was a way of becoming more fully human.
The West, too, has long revered the act of reading as a form of ethical inquiry. Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’ meditations, Simone Weil’s notebooks—these are not books in the modern sense of content delivery. They are records of a soul in search of truth. To engage them is not to acquire information, but to enter into dialogue. Reading, at its highest, is not consumption—it is conversation. And every real conversation changes us.
What happens when a culture loses this capacity? When we no longer engage in reading as dialogue but treat it as a chore, or worse, as obsolete? We begin to lose not just knowledge, but memory—of our history, of others’ inner lives, of ourselves. This is not a hypothetical fear. It is already happening.
The digital environment we inhabit is, in many ways, structurally hostile to the kind of concentration reading requires. Social media, streaming platforms, notification systems—they all train the mind in fragmentation. They teach us to skim, to scroll, to seek novelty, to flee boredom. Reading does the opposite. It forces us to stay, to endure, to reflect. And so in a world addicted to immediacy, reading feels increasingly alien. As a result, fewer people find themselves at home in their own solitude.
And solitude is not a luxury—it is the cradle of ethical thought. Without it, we do not know what we believe. We become echo chambers of trending opinions. We grow reactive, impulsive, unable to think through complexity. Democracy suffers when people no longer read, not because they lack access to information, but because they lose the habits of mind that allow them to weigh, to discern, to judge.
Education systems have not helped. In many places, reading has been reduced to a means of testing comprehension, stripped of joy, imagination, and existential weight. Students learn to decode symbols, but not to dwell with language. They learn to extract themes, but not to experience transformation. Literature is taught as a source of answers, rather than questions. Philosophy is marginalized. The result is a generation increasingly literate in appearance, but intellectually adrift.
This drift is most painfully visible in the erosion of empathy. One of the least appreciated gifts of reading—especially fiction—is that it teaches us to live inside another person’s interior world. When we read a novel with care, we learn to inhabit complexity. We come to see that others, like us, are driven by contradictions, wounds, hopes, and fears. Fiction teaches us the moral ambiguity of human life. It trains us not to judge too quickly. And in a world quick to cancel and condemn, this is no small gift.
Reading also links us to time in a way nothing else does. It connects us to voices long gone, to ancestors of the mind. It lets us overhear Marcus Aurelius worrying about virtue in the Roman court, or Zhuangzi laughing at death beneath a tree. Books are time machines. They stretch our memory backward and our imagination forward. They remind us that we are not the first to suffer, to wonder, or to love.
But when people stop reading, history becomes myth and the present becomes all-consuming. The self becomes unmoored from narrative. And without narrative, identity itself begins to collapse. We become strangers to our own experience, unable to place our lives within a coherent arc. Reading helps us recover that arc. It reminds us that the self is a story—not a fixed entity, but a process, a becoming. And it shows us how to shape that story with care.
So what can be done in the face of this cultural forgetting?
First, we must resist the urge to despair. The answer is not to retreat into elitism or cynicism. Instead, those of us who still read—who still cherish this practice—must become stewards of it. We must embody its values, not merely preach them. That means living with the patience, curiosity, and compassion that reading fosters. It means sharing books, discussing ideas, and resisting the flattening of thought wherever we can.
Second, we must make reading visible again—not as obligation, but as intimacy. Reading is not for showing off. It is not a virtue signal. It is a quiet act of fidelity—to self, to thought, to the fragile miracle of language. When we read, especially in an age that encourages us not to, we affirm that the mind still matters.
And finally, we must remember that literacy is not just a skill—it is a way of being. It is how we attend to the world. It is how we remember. It is how we become ourselves.
If we forget how to read, we will forget how to think. If we forget how to think, we will forget how to feel. And if we forget how to feel, we will forget how to be.
And then what will remain?
Only the noise.
