Everyone Stopped Reading. What Happens Next?

In the last year, less than half of all U.S. adults read a book of any type. Overall, the number of Americans reading books for pleasure has decreased by more than 40% over the last two decades. And my first thought was, well, adulting is hard. Life is busy. So, what about the kids? From 1984 to 2025, the percentage of 13-year-olds who said they rarely read a book of any type has decreased by more than 40%. Never read for fun rose from 8 to 29 percent.

A recent Atlantic article by Rose Horowitz noted, the decline in reading cuts across age groups, gender, and education levels. Even the demographics that traditionally read the most, retirees, women, and college graduates, have seen a collapse. Some people point to Barnes & Noble and the resurgence of independent bookstores, As a sign that book reading is actually making a comeback, the bookstore chain will open 60 locations this year. But bookstores notwithstanding, reading physical books is becoming a niche hobby for a shrinking part of the population.

Just 20% of adults accounted for more than 80% of all books read in America last year. A small subculture preserves the memory of books. and the 3,400 independent bookstores in the USA. Even in myself, I have noticed that I read fewer and fewer whole books each year. It takes me so much more effort to sit down at the end of a long day and pick up a book instead of my phone, and I kind of hate that. And nobody seems happy about it, just kind of resigned to the fact that we've become so distracted that even a 20-minute podcast The first episode about reading seems like a really heavy lift.

So, what happened? Why can't we read books anymore? And more urgently, what does it mean when an entire civilization abandons long-form, sustained reading? And I'm really interested in this because the more I looked into it, the more I started to feel like the real threat to democracy isn't a particular person or party. It might just be the crisis of reading. If we stop reading books, I'm not sure we're ready for what comes next.

We don't think of writing, which was developed over 5,000 years ago, and mass-market books, which came over 550 years ago, as technologies. But for tens of thousands of years, human beings got along pretty well without them. Ancient Greeks, including Socrates, warned that the invention of phonetic writing would transform how men thought. And they were right. Writing literally changed the shape of our brains. It allowed human civilizations to externalize memories and accumulate knowledge, freeing up brain space for creativity and cumulative problem-solving.

The Jesuit historian Walter Ong wrote that literacy created the conditions for inner concentration, extended focus, and logical deduction. It allowed for a new kind of rational, linear, and analytical thought. It also allowed for... Grammar, logic, and rhetoric, the liberal arts, or to put it literally, the skills of a free man. Writing and, by extension, literacy reinforce the idea of fixed laws that transcend the power of a king or a chief or a tribe, of a universal human nature that allows people to converse with one another across centuries and vastly different cultures.

Mass literacy provides the preconditions for greater freedom in a society. But also, widespread revolution. For about 2,500 years, reproducing written work was laborious and very expensive, limited to a minority of literates in any given society. And then came the printing press. In 1440, thanks to Johannes Gutenberg, the writing revolution went from a slow amble to supersonic speed. Cheap books became available to thousands of people. Including the ascendant middle class in Europe and America. You didn't have to go to the local monastery's library to read the one copy of the Bible in town.

You could read it for yourself, in the comfort of your own home, or from the pulpit of your very own church, which the Protestant Rebellion found a very attractive proposition. Religious and scientific revolutions emerged when mass literacy allowed ideas and findings to be shared around the world. Around the world in months instead of centuries. Ordinary people could access radical new takes on ancient and Christian ideals. Masses of people consumed books that transformed their ideas of themselves from largely communal creatures to radical individuals, autonomous, self-interested, and pre-political beings with natural rights.

Enter modern liberal democracy. It is not a stretch to say that the age of books made possible the age of revolution, and all the liberal ideas we take for granted, for better in America, or worse, as in France. The banned book campaigns popular today sort of tap into the feeling of the importance of free reading for a liberal society, if they weren't all fixated on books that have never actually been banned. In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury paints a terrifying picture of a totalitarian state bent on burning all the books and imposing thought control.

Well, we might be scarier, because we're doing it to ourselves. And that seems crazy. Why would a free people slowly abandon the very thing that helped make them free in the first place? I have found there are two ways to answer that question. The first is purely mechanical. And it all starts with phonics. Beginning about a hundred years ago, America slowly stopped teaching its children how to decode words. Progressive ideas of education jettisoned basic phonics, the tried-and-true method of teaching children to read by teaching them the sounds made by letters.

They ditched all that for a theory of whole-word reading. In the 1840s, Horace Mann, the father of American public education and a virulently anti-Catholic, returned from a tour of Prussia, where about 97% of all bad theories are born. He was convinced there that children are natural readers who can learn to recognize words on sight. Within 100 years, America's government schools had almost entirely moved from a phonics-based approach to the far less effective and far more laborious whole-word method championed by man.

The education industrial complex had rejected phonics and at the same time adopted standardized testing that reformed classroom curricula to emphasize excerpt analysis and atomized problem solving over synthesis, meta-analysis, and creativity that reading books requires. The results were disastrous. And the thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. See my video on how Mississippi turned this trend around when it went Back to phonics. In fact, there was a time when we had almost eradicated illiteracy from our country. In 1870, 20% of American adults could not decode English words, which is understandable given the era of mass migration we had just come through.

But 100 years later, in 1979, that number had declined to just 1%. But today, 8.4% of adults Cannot read well enough to participate in a reading study. Even among those who can read, a growing percentage are functionally illiterate, meaning while they can decode words, they can't understand more complex or analytical reading. Functional illiteracy means that education has failed to raise up a generation that can both navigate the economy and engage in the American experiment. But even if education has failed to raise up a generation that can both navigate the economy and engage in the American experiment, Every child in America mastered phonics tomorrow, or learned how to analyze the founding father's original writings, we would still have another problem.

Virtue. Now, not to pull the church lady on you, but reading well isn't just a mechanical skill or a brain optimization strategy. It's also a muscle, a habit that has to be acquired over time and sustained effort. Reading deeply means delayed gratification, like building a happy life over the years by sacrificing many small pleasures in pursuit of a greater good. Reading well is also a skill that can be lost if it isn't used consistently, and its sister virtues, attentiveness, patience, temperance, and humility.

Reading uniquely forces you to imagine faces, imagine voices, and imagine settings. To infer motives and even hold multiple ideas, or if you are reading War and Peace, 36 different family trees in your working memory at once. AI, video, and podcasts like this one all outsource those tasks and monetize them. Those synapses in our brains can atrophy, and those powers, the same powers that make us a people fit for our own self-government. Those powers in our soul go dark. Our brains are conditioned by our choice of entertainment.

The Lord of the Rings books require you to imagine images, fantastic creatures, and new worlds. The movies simply supply them for you, and they cut out most of the poetry to boot. A population that consistently allows Peter Jackson to tell them what Tolkien meant, or Christopher Nolan to tell you what Homer meant, you can imagine what he meant. Conditions itself for passivity instead of creativity. Passivity and an expectation of being entertained make us less able to delay our gratification and invest work into a far-off goal in other areas of our lives as well.

Self-government begins with self-command. If you cannot govern your own attention for 30 uninterrupted minutes, it becomes much harder to govern a republic that requires long deliberation. Patience and compromise. Exercising the brain muscles and virtues required by long-form reading and attention in turn makes us more able to focus on long-term projects and tolerate difficult demands on our effort and attention. If we can't do these things as a society, we will stop building, creating, and even loving each other. And that's a threat not just to democracy, but to all of us.

But it's really hard to break out of this. You may be sitting next to a 400-page book, but you're also sitting next to your phone. I speak for myself. The phone promises me a quick dopamine hit without requiring much effort beyond my thumb scroll. In 2004, the average attention span on a screen was two and a half minutes. By 2012, that had dropped to 75 seconds, and five years ago, 47 seconds. To put that in perspective, the time it took someone in 2004 to stay focused on one task, today's average user has already switched attention three times.

YouTube, podcasts, and short-form video, yes, I understand the irony here, might cause you to pause for 30 seconds, 2 minutes, or even 6 minutes on a single train of thought. Even when we watch full-length movies, we're on our phones. The standard way to make an action movie that we learned was, you know, you usually have like three set pieces, one in the first act, one in the second, one in the third. And now they're, you know, they're like, can we get a big one in the first five minutes?

And, you know, it wouldn't be terrible if you reiterated the plot three or four times in the dialogue because people are on their phones while they're watching, you know what I mean? On the economic side of things, not one digital platform wants to help consumers develop a taste for sustained attention. When people start reading a book for four hours a day, like, oh, Machiavelli used to, they're not being good consumers anymore, because every minute you spend inside a novel is a minute that no algorithm can monetize.

Reading isn't just difficult for each of us personally. The digital age is making it the least efficient way to get through the day, find information, entertain ourselves, or even think about deep questions anymore. We spend our work days not in muddy fields. Doing hard physical labor, but mostly on computers and screens, multitasking frantically until 5 p.m. When we come out of the jobs we work and get home, ditching Apple TV for the Brothers Karamazov now requires a jarring change of pace.

It's hard, and for a large household, getting everyone to buy in consistently to a reading culture is even harder. Ask me how I know. When we do sit down for 45 minutes with a book. We're not conditioned for a conversation with the past. We're no longer fluent in the thought patterns and pacing of Thomas More or Augustine or Aristotle. We're exhausted, and we're ready to be entertained by J.K. Rowling or Margaret Atwood. But this goes way beyond my own personal frustrations with how I relax at the end of the day, because we're not just talking about a few of us.

This is happening to all of us. And that means the change won't just be personal. It will be civilizational. Literacy, not just reading lots of words, but being able to comprehend arguments and analyze and enter into a dialogue with writers, is directly tied to how we think and interact and conceive of ourselves and the common good. A population that depends on elite literati to tell them what the law means and what the law means. And what it means for them won't be able to keep their republic.

Thomas Jefferson saw a direct line between an uneducated people and tyranny. Experience hath shown that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have in time and by slow operations perverted it into tyranny, and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be to illuminate As far as practicable, the minds of the people at large.

Tyrants understand the threat a reading public is to their power. In our own country, in the antebellum South, states like Alabama and Virginia made it a crime to teach slaves to read. The North Carolina Slave Code of 1831 explained why. Whereas the teaching of slaves to read and write has a tendency to produce insurrection and rebellion, it is a tendency to produce insurrection and rebellion. Any free person who shall hereafter teach or attempt to teach any slave within this state to read or write shall be liable to indictment.

But you don't need a slave code to produce a slave population. You just need to convince people to abandon the conditions that made them free in the first place, their family, their roots, and the capacity to imagine a better way of life. America is founded on a document and the rule of law. A republic, said Ben Franklin, if you can keep it. If mass literacy produced a revolution of radical freedom, mass post-literacy can just as easily walk those values back. And what will we value in their place?

So, yes, we are in the middle of a reading crisis. And, like Socrates' writing crisis, it's going to change, and it already has changed our brains and our lives. Based on human history, there will be good things that come out of the digital revolution's effects on how we consume information and ideas. We can point back to the advent of phonetic alphabets now, and we can say that on the whole, the writing revolution was a net positive, contra Socrates' doomsaying. It unlocked capacities in the brain and in society that we'd never seen before.

And the rise of mass literacy was the precondition of our own American revolution. So, sure, just maybe the post-literate world will also unlock new dimensions of human achievement, fruits that we haven't even imagined yet. But I'm not holding my breath. We may just find that what we lose wasn't worth the gains. So, is the solution just read more books, save the Republic, read the Harvard classics? How do we rebuild a culture that reads well in order to think well and live well?

That reads in a way that builds the virtues necessary to a common life together. I am not sanguine that American culture can turn the Titanic around at this point and convince a plurality of the population to pick up Moby Dick or War and Peace just for fun. All the incentives are pointing in the opposite direction. But what we can do is consider these questions.

How do I want to live my own life? And how can we raise the next generation to be leaven in this society? Remember, it only takes a grain of yeast for the whole loaf to rise. And I think my experiences with homeschooling my own children can give us some insight here. When I teach my own children to read, it is hard work. It's like my least favorite thing about homeschooling. But I'm not winning them over by explaining to them, this is for your own good.

You're growing in patience and virtue, or copy this sentence four times, you are rebuilding America. I'm telling them that if they persevere, they will get to find out what happens next to Odysseus on his way to Ithaca, or Frodo on his way to Mordor, or Frog and Toad on their way to the ice cream store. It's winning them over to the good life with great stories and inspiring heroes. So, like small children struggling over long and short vowels, We need to recondition ourselves and incentivize ourselves to prefer the joys that follow sacrifice and effort.

We are going to have to carve out space in our lives to practice the virtues that reading well strengthens. Blocking out distractions exercises our temperance. Unscheduled Sundays offer space for attentiveness to the goods of the mind and soul. Learning a hobby from a book, not just from YouTube or TikTok, exercises our patience. In a post-literate society, the people who do pursue book reading won't do it for anything but its own good, and that might be a consolation for a few of us.

Every great reader eventually discovers what great readers before them discovered. Books are not information storage. They represent what Chesterton called the democracy of the dead, that unbroken line to our fellow men who walked the earth before us and direct our gaze to building the future. I also like to remember those thousands of heroes and saints who were never literate and didn't consume mass market editions of the great books. They had in full the virtues that modernity developed primarily in book reading, but just without the books.

There were heroes before great expectations, and there will be heroes when the age of great expectations and its fellow classics is forgotten, but it will be much harder. So, my advice? Be an abolitionist. Teach your kids to be readers, and they will be the heroes of the age that is coming.

If you liked this episode, be sure to subscribe to LOOPcast. We bring you a new episode of The Deep every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern.