Nobody Reads Anymore
It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it. —Oscar Wilde
We read to know we're not alone. —William Nicholson
Above: The past fertilizes the soil of the present. From that, the future grows.
All across society—in corporate boardrooms and congressional chambers the world over—it increasingly seems that the inmates are running the asylum.
Unfortunately, this is not new.
Long ago Mark Twain made note of this widespread incompetence with his incisive “Suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a member of Congress; but I repeat myself.”
Charlatans and chameleons have always wet their beak; wheeling and dealing and weaseling their way up ladders corporate and administrative since man could walk and talk.
But we just don’t learn. Otto von Bismarck said it best: “Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.” By his definition, we’re a confederacy of dunces.
Ancestors distant and proximate knew so much that we’ve come to forget, that we can’t identify, If ignorance paid dividends, we’d all be filthy rich.
Why are we so consistently foolish (and not just on this first of April)?
I suspect it’s because nobody reads anything anymore.
A Economist/YouGov poll found that 46% of Americans finished zero books last year and 5% read just one last year. Out of the 1,500 American's surveyed in the poll, only 21% read more than ten books.
If you read or listened to only one book in 2023, then you read more than 46% of Americans. Reading five books puts you ahead of two-thirds of U.S. adult citizens. Readers of 10 books are in the 79th percentile, while Americans who read 20 or more books read more than 88% of their peers.
To me, a writer, this is nothing short of a travesty. I write, publicly, to be read, otherwise I would journal or graffiti or whatnot.
Though most books should be articles, most articles should be paragraphs, most paragraphs should be sentences, and most sentences should be silence, there is a treasure trove of knowledge and wisdom to be found in books.
As Rilke wrote in his marvelous Letters to a Young Poet, “[In these books] a world will come over you, the happiness, the abundance, the incomprehensible immensity of a world. Live a while in these books, learn from them what seems to you worth learning, but above all love them. This love will be repaid you a thousand and a thousand times, and however your life may turn,—it will, I am certain of it, run through the fabric of your growth as one of the most important threads among all the threads of your experiences, disappointments and joys.”
E.O. Wilson’s brilliant line comes to mind again and again: “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom.” If we don’t look up from the black mirrors of our phones, laptops, and tablets, we’ll soon resemble the humans from WALL-E:
Every journey begins with a single step.
Though books are best, if you do just one thing today, read this NPR piece that investigates why America doesn’t read anymore. Brilliantly done, it’s the kind of thing I kick myself for not writing given its topic and quality. Though I’d normally quote an excerpt, it has no false notes; as such, it’s impossible to lift just a sentence or two.
Why Doesn't America Read Anymore?
Let me know what you think — happy reading!