Reading books is an act of resistance

In the age of the attention economy, we’re not just losing time—we’re losing ourselves. Reclaiming reading is one way to fight back.

Photo by Dan Wayman on Unsplash

I hear people say all the time that they don’t have time to read anymore.

It’s become a common refrain: we’re all busy, we’re burnt out, we have too many things to do, our mental load is too heavy already. Who has the time and bandwidth to sit quietly and read a 300-page book?

This holds up in the data too: Americans are reading fewer books, and spending less time reading, than ever before.

While most people I’ve spoken to don’t exactly seem happy about the fact that they no longer read (or read far less than they used to), they have largely resigned to this state of affairs. They’ve come to accept it as normal.

But if we’re being honest, it isn’t really normal. The fact that we don’t read books anymore—and more broadly, that we feel a loss of control over how we spend our own time—is in fact a troubling symptom of a much larger problem.

So why did we stop reading?

While there are many factors, one thing is clear: the time we used to spend reading books is now largely spent on our phones consuming “content” (a word I truly loathe). A 2024 study showed that Americans are losing an estimated 36 days a year—or 3 full days per month—to content consumption, and that seems like a conservative estimate. Whatever small blocks of downtime we might have are disappearing into the abyss of Instagram reels and TikTok videos, hot takes on Substack Notes and Threads, newsletters, the news—consuming the information equivalent of entire bags of Cheeto’s and M&Ms. Much of this content, it’s worth noting, is meant to sell us something.

Lately, I’ve been feeling almost allergic to content. Like my body is physically rejecting it. Whenever I open Instagram or Substack Notes and started scrolling, I begin to feel vaguely unwell until the point at which I point the phone back down. (I’m aware of the irony of sharing this in a Substack post.)

So I decided to listen to my body and drastically reduce my content consumption for a few weeks, which brought some much-needed rebalancing and clarity. I realized that I don’t want to waste my life consuming atomized, disjointed pieces of information on platforms that were designed to profit off of my attention. I don’t want to be force-fed other people’s thoughts, opinions, and judgments to the point that I can no longer access my own thoughts and ideas. Most of all, I don’t want to let my precious time—my life—slip out of my hands, and then wonder where it’s all gone.

This is also what my death contemplation practice has taught me: that our time is precious and finite, and that we have no way of knowing how much we have left. Knowing that we will die one day, is the way we’re spending our time the way we really want to be spending it? Because if we don’t decide for ourselves what’s worth giving our time and attention to, the world will decide for us.

Rage against the content machine

Our culture of consuming fast, cheap content—and losing the interest and focus for more in-depth, nuanced reading and discussion—was dubbed “compression culture” in a recent viral Substack essay that kept popping up on my feed. I was too burned out on content to actually read it, which ended up being for the best, because the essay, ironically, was revealed to be written by a plagiarist. (If we don’t take the time to read with patience and depth, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised when our writers can’t be bothered to write with care and intention, either.)

Despite my lifelong love of books and personal wariness around social media (I never got on TikTok or Threads), I am just as guilty of mindless content consumption as anyone else. But more recently, I have felt a growing need to resist this way of operating.

The thing is, I miss reading books. Too often my books sit sadly on my nightstand or piled on my desk, unopened or otherwise abandoned a third of the way through. Of course, the obligations of motherhood, solopreneurship and endless household duties make time for reading more scarce. But there is also something more insidious is at play.

Yes, I’m a new mother. And yes, we’re all busy. But it is also true that we are rapidly losing control of our own attention to an economy that is designed to steal it from us. (If you want to know how bad it’s really gotten, I recommend this excellent essay by Chris Hayes in The Atlantic).

There’s no question that we are losing our attention—and with the loss of our attention, we lose the freedom to choose how we spend our lives. The problem is that we often don’t realize until it’s too late, until we’ve already lost months and years of our time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the metaphor of the boiling frogs. As it goes, the frogs are sitting in water that’s heating very slowly, too slowly for them to notice that they’re boiling alive, so they never jump out to save themselves. In the same way, we often fail to notice or respond to the gradual negative changes shaping our lives—until it's too late.

That’s what the attention economy is doing to us.

Back in 2003, the late David Foster Wallace saw this coming:

“Here in the U.S. every year, it becomes more and more difficult to ask people to read, or to look at a piece of art for an hour, or to listen to a piece of music that’s complicated and that takes work to understand.

Because, well there are a lot of reasons. But particularly now in computer and internet culture, everything is so fast. The faster things go, the more we feed the part of ourselves that goes fast, but don’t feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet; that can live in quiet.

Reading requires sitting alone by yourself in a quiet room. I have friends—intelligent friends—who don’t like to read because they get, it’s not just bored, but there’s an almost dread that comes up here around having to be alone and having to be quiet.”

Feeding only the part of ourselves that goes fast comes at a cost. In her important book How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell names what’s really at stake here:

“In the short term, distractions can keep us from doing the things we want to do. In the longer term, however, they can accumulate and keep us from living the lives we want to live, or, even worse, undermine our capacities for reflection and self-regulation.”

What Odell is getting at is what really concerns me: It’s not just a loss of attention, it’s a loss of self.

What we often fail to notice with the slow creep of the attention economy is the gradual erosion of our freedom, our agency, and our inner lives. Because when we lose our ability to pay attention, not only do we lose the thread of a story, we start to lose the thread of who we are. With the fracturing of our attention, our selfhood also becomes disjointed; divorced from any larger unifying framework of meaning to contain all the different aspects of who we are.

Reading books is a quiet rebellion

A few months ago, I was walking down the street in Brooklyn when I overheard a woman talking on the phone: “People always ask me how I read so many books. I mean… I just spend a lot of time reading.”

Instantaneously, I wanted to be her friend. What a badass! A rebel. A resister of the attention economy. While the rest of us were allowing our brains to rot on social media or watching TV, she was feeding hers with literature. It felt almost countercultural.

Why couldn’t I choose to spend my time reading books, too? Why wasn’t I?

The solution was pretty simple: start reading again. Read physical, dog-eared books, in my case, usually with lots of underlines and stars and notes in the margins.

For most of my life, I spent hours reading books every week, simply because I enjoyed it. Much of my childhood was spent escaping into books, which were a source of both comfort and wonder. There’s a photo of me when I was three years old, sitting in the middle of a giant pile of books that I’d pulled off the shelves, as if I was trying to read them all at once.My love of books led me to study English literature and philosophy, and to build a career as a writer and editor. Today, I make a living primarily through helping people write books—work that I enjoy and find deeply meaningful.

At first it took some effort, but quickly it became easy. I started to crave the time with my books. So far this Summer, I’ve read at least half a dozen books—novels, memoirs, Buddhist books, even a 1920s comedy of errors—and it has been a healing balm for my fragmented brain.

Reading has made me happy. It’s helped me relax. It’s made me feel connected to other humans; ones I don’t even know. It’s been a point of reconnection to my own inner world. It’s taught me new things about who I am and who I want to be. As Virginia Woolf put: “Books are mirrors of the soul.”

I’ve been reminded that a book is an experience, a contemplation. It’s not just about taking in information but discovering a new world. A book is a companion throughout the time you’re reading it, staying with you in your thoughts, and infusing itself into your outlooks and perspectives.

Reading books is pleasurable in a way that doesn’t require further justification. But if we must validate it, reading also boosts empathy, reduces stress, prevents cognitive decline and can even improve our sleep. Research supports bibliotherapy, the use of reading books as a therapeutic tool, for mental health conditions including depression, anxiety, PTSD, and grief. Either self-guided or facilitated by a therapist, bibliotherapy typically involves reading books that help a person process their emotions, gain insight, or learn how to cope with challenging situations. And let’s be honest: no therapy content you read on Instagram can do that for you.

Reading nourishes our inner lives in a way that TikTok videos and Substack Notes never will. It reminds us that we’re not just consumers of content but creators of worlds. When we enter another person’s world, and in doing so, expand our own world, push the boundary of our own thinking and perspectives.

Kurt Vonnegut, naturally, said it best:

I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found. By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

This to me is a miracle.

I’ve started to think of reading books as one of the last remaining acts of cultural resistance. It asks us to turn away from the noise, sit alone in a quiet room, as Wallace says, and engage deeply with thoughts, ideas and feelings. For our own sanity, and also in service of a saner world.

Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”

Perhaps this is what our culture needs right now: a mass resistance of people who are willing to put down their phones and start reclaiming their own attention, one book at a time.

Who’s with me?