Do You Read Enough?
I bet you don’t.
At least that’s what we’re constantly being told.
Every few months another article appears warning that Americans don’t read anymore. Books are disappearing. Attention spans are collapsing. Smartphones have replaced deep reading with endless scrolling. If we’re not careful, we’ll become a nation incapable of sustained thought.
There is truth in those warnings.
But I think they’re aimed at the wrong target.
I still read books.
Just not the way I used to.
If I compared my reading today to twenty years ago, I’ve probably cut back by seventy or eighty percent. That sounds depressing until I ask myself another question.
Am I actually reading less?
Or am I reading differently?
I still spend hours every day surrounded by ideas. Articles. Essays. Blogs. News. Podcasts. Research. Conversations with AI that sometimes feel closer to a college seminar than a search engine.
I’m probably exposed to more information today than I have been at any other point in my life.
So why does something still feel different?
I don’t think reading is the real story.
I think the cognitive environment is.
The smartphone didn’t simply replace reading.
It replaced the environment books lived in.
That’s a much bigger change than we usually admit.
People often say the phone is a distraction machine.
I think that’s too easy.
The real change is that the phone became the place where our judgments are increasingly formed.
Every swipe.
Every pause.
Every click.
Every like.
The system quietly learns what version of you keeps looking.
It rewards speed over patience.
Reaction over reflection.
Affirmation over curiosity
Certainty over doubt.
Novelty over continuity.
It isn’t simply giving us information.
It is shaping the conditions under which information becomes judgment.
None of this removes responsibility.
We still choose.
But we increasingly choose inside environments that reward quick reactions, emotional certainty, social confirmation, and constant novelty while making reflection slower, rarer, and easier to abandon.
That should concern us.
Not because phones are evil.
Because they have changed the environment in which thinking takes place.
My brother is an interesting example.
He is not a big book reader. But he reads technical manuals that are far beyond anything I could easily follow. His work requires understanding complex systems, and he can absorb information that I would struggle with.
That forced me to admit something.
Maybe people not reading was the wrong place to look.
Clearly people can still develop remarkable intellectual abilities without spending their evenings reading philosophy or history.
So what exactly are we worried about losing?
I don’t think it’s intelligence.
I think it’s something else.
I’ve started thinking about meta-awareness.
The ability to notice yourself thinking.
Not simply asking:
“What do I think?”
But asking:
“Why does this feel true?”
“Why am I so certain?”
“What assumptions am I making?”
“What would actually change my mind?”
That feels different to me.
And I’m not convinced our current environment asks very much of it.
Here’s what worries me.
I swipe open to a video on TikTok.
It lands with perfect emotional timing.
Someone absolutely just destroyed an argument in thirty seconds.
Thousands of people in the comments applaud.
And because other people seem to agree, my certainty feels shared rather than borrowed.
Then the algorithm immediately gives me another one.
And another.
By the end of twenty minutes I don’t just have opinions.
I have the feeling that I’ve earned them.
But have I?
Or have I simply experienced the emotional rewards that usually accompany thinking?
Those aren’t the same thing.
That distinction has become harder for me to ignore.
This is what the algorithm is designed to prevent.
The environment doesn’t just distract us from reflection.
It quietly makes reflection unnecessary.
Instead it rewards speed, certainty, and emotional payoff while making the slower, humbler work of reflection feel unnecessary or even unnatural.
People often imagine that reason and emotion are opposites.
They’re not.
One of the things I learned from Antonio Damasio is that feelings aren’t obstacles to thinking. They’re part of how thinking works. Without them we struggle to make decisions at all.
The problem isn’t feeling.
The problem is when an environment learns to reliably produce feelings before we’ve had time to reflect on why we’re having them.
When that happens, the feeling can become a substitute for reflection instead of an invitation to it.
This is also why AI has become so fascinating to me.
People ask whether AI is going to make us stop thinking.
Sometimes it will.
If we use it as a vending machine for answers.
But that’s not the interesting question.
The interesting question is what kind of thinking it encourages.
I’ve found myself asking one AI to criticize another. Pushing them to disagree. Looking for the places where my own assumptions start to wobble.
Sometimes that process exposes weaknesses in my thinking.
Sometimes it simply gives my existing beliefs a more polished vocabulary.
Those two experiences can feel remarkably similar.
That’s the danger.
AI can make borrowed ideas feel like discoveries.
It can make clarity feel like understanding.
Or, used differently, it can become another source of friction—another place where your own thinking is forced to confront something it didn’t expect.
The tool isn’t what matters.
The environment you build around the tool does.
I don’t think we’re living through the end of reading.
I think we’re living through the beginning of a very different cognitive environment.
The question isn’t whether we have access to enough information.
We do.
The question is what kinds of minds our environment is quietly encouraging us to become.
Where are the incentives to reflect?
Not to react.
To reflect.
Reflection is slow.
It often ends with uncertainty.
It requires admitting you might be wrong.
Those are terrible qualities if your business depends on maximizing engagement.
There isn’t much money in helping millions of people become slightly less certain of themselves.
There is enormous value in making certainty immediate, emotional, and endlessly repeatable.
Maybe that’s the real warning hidden inside all those articles about Americans not reading.
Not that we’ve stopped consuming information.
Not even that we’ve stopped thinking.
But that we’ve begun mistaking the emotional sensation of thinking for thinking itself.
If that’s true, then the problem was never really about reading.
It was always about the environment in which our minds are formed.
