I recently read a couple of fantastic articles in the ‘Free Press’ : ‘Without books we’d be barbarians’. and ‘The Dawn of the Post-literate society..

The TLDR is that there is a massive decline in reading and literacy.

Instead of reading, we’re consuming short form video, youtube/TV and podcasts, and that has major implications for human flourishing intellectually, politically and morally.

A few reasons why the decline in reading and writing is bad :

1. The ability to read means the ability to follow a train of logical thought

There is only so much information you can convey orally or with video. In the article, he gives an example of complex philosophical arguments or scientific writing. This requires having the information on the page, in the form of sentences, that one can follow the logical trail of. You can go back, re-read and form concepts, that is simply not possible with podcasts.

If we cannot follow logical trains of thought, or complex ideas – which reading allows us to do, then we cease to understand the world.

When people stop being able to read—to make sense of the meaning of text on a page—they also lose the ability to make sense of the world.

2. The ability to write is the ability to collate thoughts and create coherent arguments

With a decline in reading, you also get a decline in writing. As many people have said : writing is thinking. If we lose the ability to write, we lose the ability to coherently form arguments.

This is compounded by the advent of LLM’s, where now instead of thinking through a problem (writing essays), you can outsource that to an LLM.

3. The ability to read and write is the foundation for democracy

To be able to articulate your views, without resorting to rhetoric or obfuscation with words is the basis of democracy. To read those thoughts and evaluate them based on the argument itself, rather than biases or rhetoric from the person saying it, is crucial for evaluating ideas independently.

If you want to make your case in person or in a TikTok video, you have innumerable means for bypassing logical argument. You can shout and weep and charm your audience into submission. Such appeals are not rational. But human beings are not perfectly rational animals and are inclined to be persuaded by them.

A book can’t yell at you (thank God!) and it can’t cry. Authors are much more reliant on reason alone, condemned to painfully piece their arguments together sentence by sentence (I feel that agony now).

It’s why we see a rise in pundits, scam artists, populists - they argue based on rhetoric. It’s much easier to convince someone with bad arguments in person, than if the arguments were written down on the page.

Laid out on the page, their arguments would seem absurd. On the screen, they are persuasive to many people.

4. Cognitive benefits and learning

I rarely feel ’taxed’ or ‘cognitively stretched’ when watching a video or listening to a podcast.

But with reading a complex text, you feel a level of mental exertion.

This is good. Like reps in the gym create a strong and fit body that adapts to the increasing load (’thinking of Arnie talking about the pump’), mental effort and strain creates a strong mind.

We’re drowning in an ocean of passive consumption. Previously, when bored, we may have resorted to picking up an instrument, or a book, or socialising or myriad of other activities, now we can pick up the smartphone and passively consume.

In the article, they reference a drop in reading, writing, arithmetic scores in kids since the advent of phones. Similarly with IQ.

The collapse of reading is driving declines in various measures of cognitive ability. Reading is associated with a number of cognitive benefits including improved memory and attention span, better analytical thinking, improved verbal fluency, and lower rates of cognitive decline in later life.

I don’t think this is a surprise to anyone.

Reading is just a more active way of engaging with the material. I see this with podcasts. I’m a huge podcast listener, and when I think at the amount of information I retain when I listen versus when I actively read a book, it is miniscule.

 You may think you are learning from the podcasts you listen to. But I defy you to write down the arguments you heard a week ago, much less the evidence that was adduced in support of them.

You’re just not using the same cognitive muscles when you are listening/watching, versus reading.

It’s not even that we’re going to an oral society, that is predicated on memorisation. Instead, we’re going towards a broadcast society, where information is just passively broadcasted to the masses.

5. Living life twice

For centuries, almost all educated and intelligent people have believed that literature and learning are among the highest purposes and deepest consolations of human existence. The greatest novels and poems enrich our sense of the human experience by imaginatively putting us inside other minds and taking us to other times and other places. By reading nonfiction—science, history, philosophy, travel writing—we become deeply acquainted with our place in the extraordinary and complicated world we are privileged to inhabit.

There is something we get from fiction, poetry, travel writing, good science writing etc.

Reading and writing are tools to understand ourselves, the world and others around us. It provides a portal to feeling, emotion and the ‘wordless’. You can put yourself in the shoes of someone else.

It allows you to ’taste life twice’. It’s difficult to articulate what exactly we get from fiction (if it were easy, maybe it would be non-fiction), but I can say the wisest, kindest and most thoughtful people I’ve met tend to be extremely well read.

Actionable tips

• Delete all social media from your phone (use your laptop if you ever have to access)
• Carry around your kindle or a book and let that be the default thing you pick up
• Write something. For yourself, or publish it on a blog, substack. Whatever to get the habit of writing ingrained. If you do enough bad writing, you’ll eventually get good.
• ‘I dont have time to read’ - the average person has a screentime of 7 hours… use this argument anytime you find yourself strapped for time.

Part of my 30 day November blogathon challenge.

I recently took a train journey up to Manchester. An early morning train through the just waking British countryside, the sun bathing the carriage in a golden light. I spent the 2 hours immersed in a book, occasionally pausing to stare out of the window.

When I reached Manchester, I was in a sort of reverie, a state of heightened attention, and so sat for a while amidst all of the passengers rushing to get off the train.

In that moment, I saw a pigeon, amongst the blur of feet, gently hopping around and pausing to take a sip of water that was inbetween a set of cracked tiles.

And I burst out in a huge grin, and took my time getting off the train.

Going to try write a blog post everyday in the month of November to get back into creative writing. This will include (hopefully) fiction, poetry and non-fiction.

As a list to myself, here are the non-fiction topics I want to explore

1. How to balance ambition/career/‘hedonic’ treadmill with a present and playful life
2. What is play and how can we incorporate more of it into life
3. What is love (recently read ‘The Art of Loving by Eric Fromm)
4. The role of art in our lives (recently read ‘What Art Does’ by Brian Eno)
5. Writing and LLM’s (Why we probably shouldn’t outsource thinking to them)
6. Predictive processing/active inference and how this links in with neuroscience and meditation (influenced by a series of lectures I attended with Shamil Chanderia)
7. Why we need to make things beautiful (a quote by Tolkien : “Lothlórien is beautiful because there the trees were loved.”)
8. On loving-kindness meditation (reading and listening to Sylvia Boorstein, what a lovely lady!)
9. What women don’t understand about men
10. Conversation and how to do it well ( three levels of conversation (informational, personal, relational). dignity-humility map
11. The importance of dressing well (I know, but this is for me. I read a great article in the FP about this)
12. Attention and love (they are the same thing)
13. Theories of consciousness
14. The process of writing being about becoming (becoming the kind of person who would think those thoughts or put down those sentences)
15. On what we learn from dancing
16. Obsession vs competitiveness (scientists tend to obsessive, businessmen tend to be competitive)
17. What we get from poetry
18. How to learn, how to pursue mastery
19. Book summaries of things I’ve read (Henry Shukman)
20. On walking (“The world reveals itself to those who travel by foot” Werner Herzog)
21. On integrity, nobility, poise (words and ways of being that I like)

Expect the posts to be bad. They will be first drafts, often written during time strapped working weeks.

I hope to post a few on substack (more than 1000-2000+ word articles).

November 2025 Posts