Decline in reading

October 13, 2026

I’m declaring writing about the supposed decline of reading to be a sore and tiresome subject. Much like metawriting. Elyse Graham identified the trope in This Is Your Brain on Books in November 2023. Everyone is worried about the kids these days wasting their day away on TikTok. David Henkin writes in The Book Is a Time Machine in July 2018 in a review on the reoccurring malaise.

We sense that we don’t read quite the way we used to, and that it matters.

In July 2026 Cal Newport reflects on Rose Horowitch’s article published in the same month in the The Atlantic on the subject, The End of Reading is Here (at over 8,500 words).

The supposed decline of reading tugs at our emotions and yet is too abstract to reliably prove or disprove (opinion presented as fact). A thinking trap of catastrophizing. Every charged anecdote in Horowtich’s article is an opinion presented as fact. We should not read too much into the decline in reading. If anything it is a symptom of the general anxiety towards technological progress The lack of reading is a signal, but the worry about it isn’t new. Don’t listen to anyone who sees this as more than a blip.

In looking through my bookmarks, I stumbled upon an January 2026 essay by Adam Mastroianni, Text is king who provides a satisfying counterpoint to all of the people who claim reading is doomed.

I am skeptical of this thesis. I used to study claims like these for a living, so I know that the mind is primed to believe narratives of decline. We have a much lower standard of evidence for “bad thing go up” than we do for “bad thing go down”.

See also: Nicolás Boullosa in August 2026 adds a more nuanced perspective in Footnotes to an invisible text: summaries can be great, reading is better, tracing an idea how what we are writing or reading about is often for an audience of one. In August 2017 Charles Chu offers says It’s Okay to “Forget” What You Read responding to a December 2014 Paul Graham essay How You Know. These last two deal not with the decline of reading but deal with how much we retain. I’m in agreement with Andy Matuschak in a 2019 article Why Books Don’t Work who suggests we’re not all reading Thinking, Fast and Slow not for their entertainment value, but to learn something. I’ll quote (again) Arun Rao in October 2024 with his thoughts on why he reads:

But mere usefulness is too strict a criterion. An equal goal is pleasure. I’ve rewired my brain so reading to learn is highly pleasurable. Often I learn fun and useless material that my curiosity takes me to.

Rao also quotes Jorge Luis Borges:

I believe that the phrase “obligatory reading” is a contradiction in terms; reading should not be obligatory. Should we ever speak of “obligatory pleasure”? What for? Pleasure is not obligatory, pleasure is something we seek. Obligatory happiness! We seek happiness as well.

I see reading and research as a kind of discovery process. A kind of play. An extension of our curiosity. However this framing feels too circular. Not enough certainty. Why though do we continue to read? What are we looking for? Humans have a strong desire for curiosity and interaction. What Borges imagined in the Library of Babel, we are seeing today, an endless library of information, compounded exponentially by the advent of generative AI.