Today, I had a short discussion with someone who was annoyed that she wasn't able to read anymore. She attributed it to her concentration getting worse and all of that. The usual discourse, except I found this version more honest because it wasn't people aren't reading anymore. It was just: I'm not able to read anymore, and it kind of sucks.
My first reaction was: you need to change the book you're reading. Find something you actually want to read.
And she was like, yeah, that's cool, but I really can't read anything. I'm going to end up reading Martine à la plage or T'choupi (french children books).
That got me thinking.
There is this discourse everywhere online about how learning is important and people should read more. People don't read anymore, and it's a fucking shame, and that's why the country or the world is going downhill, depending on who you're listening to, and blah blah blah.
And yeah. Reading is cool. Reading is a noble thing to do. I generally nod my head when someone says people should read more books because I do think reading improves your life and opens up your mind. It's a fantastic practice with loads of benefits.
But I'm also a little worried that we're doing something with this discourse: promoting the act itself as the noble thing, rather than what the act is trying to do.
There is this law in economics that as soon as you start tracking something, the metric becomes obsolete. One reason this happens is that people find ways around it. Usually, when you hear that, you think of people cheating. Someone trying to make the government think they earn less so they don't have to pay as much taxes, or trying to make an audience think they're doing better than they actually are so they can sell them more stuff.
But I don't think you need any malicious attempt for this to happen.
When you start tracking and encouraging the action rather than what the action means, you also discourage other things that might not look like what you're trying to do, even though they are.
For example: reading tweets.
The consensus is that reading tweets is definitely not learning. But when I look at my own learning, I've learned so much on Twitter. It opened up my world in ways that were amazing and good. I discovered incredible people sharing ideas that, yes, I could perhaps have found in books, but I found them on Twitter. I read them on Twitter. I understood them on Twitter.
I think you need to be open to any kind of medium teaching you something.
It might be a children's book. It might be a tweet. It might be a YouTube video. The idea isn't lesser because it doesn't come from a book, and the learning isn't lesser if you don't do it primarily through books.
At the same time, yes, I want to encourage people to read because I think it's a wonderful activity. There aren't many equivalents to what reading a book can do.
But I don't want the essence of reading to be sacrificed on the altar of promoting reading at any cost.
I think this is what happens whenever we encourage or discourage an activity instead of looking at what we're actually trying to get from it. It's the same when people say: you need to be less on your phone.
Do you? Do you really need to be less on your phone, or do you need to use your phone in a different way? Are we spending lots and lots of hours on our phones and screens in ways that are probably not good for us? Yes. Does that mean all screen time is bad? No. Not at all.
It comes back to the essence of the activity.
Because you could also be reading things that are harmful to you. You could read completely stupid theories and agree with all of them. That would still be reading. By the simple metric of reading is good, it would count as a good thing. But it isn't. You could also skim through books without thinking about what you're reading at all. Maybe that's neutral. Maybe it's just a waste of time. I don't know. But the physical act of going through a book isn't automatically valuable just because it is called reading.
For sure though, it's harder to promote the essence of something than it is to promote one activity and make it the metric.
Read more books is simple. Open up your world to more people and ideas is less simple. It can look like too many different things.
I guess this is a slightly different position to be in than when I wrote gasp, I'm not a reader. But I think the idea is connected. We need to go back to the essence of things.
And it's applicable to almost anything.
Working out is only beneficial if you're doing it in a way that gives you the result you actually want. It's not just work out to get hot. It can be work out to be healthy, to move your body, to have a better relationship with it. And if you can get those things by doing something else that isn't called working out, all the better.
Maybe you don't have to read books.
What people like me who say read more books actually mean is: open up your world to more people.
And you can do that in many, many ways.
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this is an experiment in AI assisted writing : read the whole experiment here -> % of human vs AI in AI-assisted writing