We Killed Reading the Same Way We Caused the Obesity Epidemic

Reading Is a Workout Your Brain Isn't Getting Anymore

The state of reading is depressing.

Consider the following:

• Less than 50% of US adults read a book of any kind in 2022.

• Share of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day: 28% (2004) → 16% (2023).

• The share of 13-year-olds who “rarely or never” read for fun: 8% in 1984 → 31% in 2023.

• Only 35% of 2024 high-school seniors were “proficient” at analyzing complex themes.

These all came from a recent piece in The Atlantic on the end of reading by Rose Horowitch. And if you want to feel even more depressed, consider this line from Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers: “(Reading) is becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”

There’s no sugarcoating it. If you’re a lover of reading, it’s grim out there. It’s easy to turn articles like this into high-brow think pieces lamenting the decline of something we care a lot about. But I’d like to do something a bit different and more hopeful.

You see, I wasn’t a reader growing up. I resisted every attempt, choosing to read the CliffsNotes, watch the movie, or even read the children’s picture-book version of any book I was assigned in school. In my high school days, I’m pretty sure Huck Finn was the only assigned book I finished.

But somehow, I turned into a reader and writer. And on the other side, my wife was an avid reader who spent a number of years as an elementary school teacher and then literacy specialist. So between the two of us, we’ve got both sides covered.

Instead of lamenting why so few people read books or longform pieces anymore, let’s cover what to do about it. First, the problem.

Where We Went Wrong

This is our obesity epidemic moment. In short, over the past 40 years, we flooded the market with candy and processed foods, while at the same time eliminating green spaces, parks, and bike- or pedestrian-friendly areas. We reduced recess and PE time, made sports pay-to-play, and stuck kids in front of screens and phones to make sure they didn’t move. In sum, we made comfort easy, and rigged the environment against eating real food or moving much at all.

We did the same with reading. We rigged the environment, changed how we teach it, and we stripped out the choice and joy.

We don’t do anything deeply anymore. We live in a world of skimming that resembles knowledge the same way our franken-foods resemble the real variety.

TikTok, Instagram, Twitter — all of them teach us to skim, looking for some shiny object to catch our eye before moving on to the next thing. Researching used to mean going deep on a topic. Then it became googling for a quick answer. Now AI teaches us to go after the gist. All to create the illusion of knowing.

In a recent article, Amherst professor Austin Sarat detailed how the students he teaches at an elite university can no longer finish a book. “Students now come to my office not to discuss what they’ve read, but to ask how to skim it. I generally refuse. I try instead to teach them close reading — the slow, deliberate kind that can’t be shortcut.”

He’s not fighting the tide alone: surveys of high school English teachers show they now assign an average of 2.81 full books a year, down from four a decade and a half ago. Some students reach graduation having read only excerpts.

It’s the end result of a society that values superficial convenience over slow, hard-earned depth.

And that has consequences. According to attention researcher Gloria Mark at UC Irvine, our average sustained attention on a screen has dropped from 2.5 minutes in 2004 to 47 seconds. We’ve essentially detrained our brains. It’s like telling someone who hasn’t exercised in 20 years to start by running 3 miles every day. When a short walk makes you out of breath, telling someone to run is a death march.

If you can only focus for less than a minute, there’s little hope of reading a book. Your brain does what it’s trained to do: look around and find something better. And that something better is often a video on your phone designed to keep you scrolling.

We can see the impact of phones in the data. When surveys look at the frequency of reading and the reported enjoyment of it, both fall off a cliff at the average age a kid gets their first smartphone (10–11ish).

And while it’s easy to get pessimistic and blame the phones and the kids, that would be doing them a disservice. As Sarat found when he started a course called “Why Read?”: “What struck me wasn’t students’ lack of interest — it was how unevenly prepared they were even to attempt something long and difficult.”

This is at a school that costs $75,000 a year and is ranked the #2 National Liberal Arts School in the country. If kids there can’t read, what hope is there for the rest of us?

To take the obesity analogy further, it’s not just our attention spans and phones. It’s that many kids and adults weren’t given the foundation to read well.

For roughly two decades, most US schools taught reading through balanced literacy. We stopped teaching phonics and instead focused on cueing and guessing. It’s akin to what my toddler does when she says “let me read this!” and then guesses what’s happening based on the pictures. That’s fine for a 2-year-old. Not so much for an elementary schooler trying to read the words. The result was a decline in early literacy, especially for those who needed the education the most.

We gave a whole generation of students a poor foundation. If you don’t have that foundational skill, why would you read for fun, or dare to take on longer books? It’s simply not possible to fall in love with reading early if you can’t read.

But even for our quality readers, there was another shift in schools that harmed enjoyment: the big push toward standardized testing. Middle and high school grades moved away from books and toward excerpts and short texts focused on comprehension. Why read an entire book when all the tests were going to be short passages? This was one of the ultimate teach-to-the-test moments.

In short, we spent 20 years teaching kids to guess at words instead of decode them, then tested them on fragments instead of books. Two ways to make reading feel like a chore and a failure at the same time.

We can see the impact in a 2023 Scholastic survey: the percent of frequent readers (5+ days/week) drops from 46% at ages 6–8 → 32% at 9–11 → 21% at 12–14 → 15% at 15–17. In the same survey, reading enjoyment falls from 70% (ages 6–8) to 46% (ages 12–17). And when they looked at what makes someone a lover of reading, the kids who picked their own books were far more likely to become frequent readers.

We turned reading from something fun into a subject to learn.

It’s not rocket science, yet we got it wrong, and the last few generations of readers have been screwed. Look what they were up against:

1. The rise of phones and tech commanding all attention, with little oversight.

2. Education policies that didn’t help literacy, and moved away from reading actual books.

We gave them an environment rich in highly processed foods (phones, social media) and then rigged the environment against them (lower literacy, worse education, little choice or actual books). If your stated goal was to kill reading books, I’m not sure you could develop a better plan.

Of course, it’s not just kids and young adults. Adults have been captured by their environment as well. We’ve traded the bedtime read for the bedtime scroll. And our attention spans have atrophied just as much, if not more. Reading has been crowded out by shiny objects — and even for those who desire to learn, by things that create the illusion of depth.

We’re inundated with CliffsNotes on steroids: short summaries of books, texts, and complex subjects. We ask AI for a synopsis whenever we’re stuck, then act like we know something. And we’ve largely replaced reading with longform podcasts and YouTube videos. Which — as someone who makes both — have value. But what they lack is the proactive discernment that reading teaches. Listening is more passive; we tune in and out, and seldom pause to question the argument.

Reading, on the other hand, demands engagement. And it’s that engagement that produces so many of the benefits.

How Reading Helps

Reading is exercise for our brain. It’s the single most concentrated workout there is for attention.

Briefly, a few key insights from the research:

• It rewires our brain. In a study out of Emory, having people read a novel over nine nights produced heightened brain connectivity in both language and sensorimotor areas that persisted for five days after they finished.

• It builds knowledge and vocabulary. Our conversations and even TV shows contain roughly half the rare words a book does. It’s why first-grade reading ability predicts print exposure all the way out to 11th grade. Every book you read is scaffolding for the next one.

• Fiction is “a flight simulator for social life,” in psychologist Keith Oatley’s phrase. A 2018 meta-analysis found that fiction reading causally improves social cognition.

• It protects the brain. Book readers had a ~23-month survival advantage and ~20% lower mortality over 12 years vs. non-readers, and a mentally active reading life is linked to less cognitive impairment late in life — cognitive reserve.

• It improves listening and comprehension before kids can even read. In one study, preschoolers from heavy home-reading environments showed greater activation in narrative-comprehension regions while just listening to stories.

Those benefits compound. Every book provides background knowledge that makes the next book richer, your comprehension quicker, and staying focused easier. It’s the only workout where the equipment upgrades itself.

So what do we do about it?

1. The phones, phones, phones…

Let’s start with the obvious. We need to repair and retrain our attention, and that starts with minimizing the thing destroying it: our phones. Consider what happened when researchers removed or limited them:

• After just 72 hours of phone restriction, brain scans showed craving circuits quieting — even while people said they felt no different.

• A two-week digital detox improved sustained attention by an amount equivalent to reversing 10 years of age-related cognitive decline.

• Partial removal helps! Only a fraction of people in one study fully unplugged, yet 91% still improved on attention, mood, or wellbeing.

How do we do it? Rig your environment. Just as you have to make it easy to get out the door to exercise, or hard to binge on junk food, you’ve got to do the same with reading.

• Limit phone time and add friction to the things that sap attention. Get a Brick to shut off your apps; take social media off your phone entirely. Put your Kindle or audiobook app front and center.

• Charge your phone in another room, not next to your bed. Create spaces meant for reading, not scrolling.

• Block off deep reading time with no other distractions. Same time each day, preferably the same place.

• If you read on a device, buy an e-reader that doesn’t do anything else.

• Make it active. Bring a pen or highlighter. Underline, argue in the margins, take notes.

2. Kill the elitism. Stop gatekeeping.

We do best when we choose exercise we enjoy. It’s the same with books, especially when starting out. It’s about establishing the habit, then letting the habit lead you into other genres.

Goosebumps, Harry Potter, manga, fiction, self-help, romance… I do not care. Read what you enjoy. Comic books get a bad rap, but research shows they aren’t dumbed down: one analysis found comics contained as many rare words as a sample of adult books (53.5 vs. 52.7 rare words per 1,000).

Too often we play gatekeeper, insisting someone love some prestige classic, when the point is to get people reading anything!

What unlocked my love of reading was a teacher letting me read Once a Runner for a book report — which led to more running books, and eventually, when I was ready, far beyond. The same goes for format. Hardcover, e-book, even audiobook: who cares. Just get people reading.

While we’re at it: you don’t have to finish. As a notoriously slow reader, I used to trudge through books and lose enthusiasm — and the pull of the book got too weak to compete with distraction. Now I do a few things to keep the pull strong:

• Embrace quitting. I give a book 50 pages, and if it’s not holding my attention, I have permission to quit. Quitting isn’t failure. It’s how you protect the habit.

• Cycle through multiple books. I usually have 2 or 3 going. You don’t watch the same show every evening — sometimes you’re in the mood for history, sometimes fiction. Rotate.

Too often we let perfect be the enemy of good, and we become that dude at the gym critiquing the person trying the stair climber for the first time. We run that person off instead of inviting them into a new world.

The proof is in the pudding: one of the few rapidly growing segments in publishing is romantasy. Millions of twenty-somethings got dragged back to books by dragon-romance novels. That’s not a decline in standards. That’s an on-ramp.

3. Start early. Make reading fun, not a chore.

Read to your kids. It matters for a number of reasons.

First, kids mirror what adults actually do, not what they say. If you say reading is great but you’re endlessly scrolling, guess what little Johnny or Suzy picks up? Model reading as a priority — bedtime reading with them, and letting them see you read around the house.

Second, it creates a bonding experience. Reading becomes less of a chore and more of something everyone looks forward to.

According to survey data from HarperCollins, Gen Z parents are more likely than previous generations to see reading as a “subject to learn” instead of a fun activity, and only 40% of parents of kids 13 and under agree that “reading books to my child is fun for me.” Which is probably why the share of children aged 0–4 who are read to daily or nearly daily has dropped from 64% in 2012 to 41% today.

When we treat something like work, it sucks the fun out of it. Just ask anyone who’s made their hobby their job. It can be done, but the moment we shift from “choose to” to “have to,” joy, fun, and intrinsic motivation plummet.

Reading shouldn’t be homework. If you see going for a run as punishment to endure, you’re never going to last. Whether it’s kids or adults, you’ve got to enjoy the thing.

One tip for parents — the bedtime loophole: if normal bedtime is 8:00, they can stay up until 8:30 if they’re reading. Reading becomes the privilege, not the chore.

4. Rig the environment.

When I was talking to NBA champion Shane Battier about kids and youth sports, he said, “If you want your kids to play sports, just put balls all around the house and things they can throw them into.” He said it somewhat in jest, but his point was spot on. Our environment invites action. It’s true in sport and in reading.

If you want kids to read, have books everywhere. It’s what my wife did as a teacher — comfortable reading nooks as the go-to spot in her classroom, surrounded by hundreds of books organized by level and topic. It’s what she did in our home with our two young girls: piles of books in the living room, in each bedroom, in the playroom. And we rotate them.

The research backs her up. In a study across 31 societies, growing up in a home with 500+ books predicted 2.4 extra years of education in the US, with lasting effects on adult literacy and numeracy. Researchers call it the home library effect. Books lying around aren’t clutter. They’re infrastructure.

It’s the same for adults. Stephen King takes a book with him everywhere so he defaults to reading in the in-between moments. The modern version might be a Kindle app on a phone with no social media. Or better yet, a book on your nightstand and one on the couch. You want books calling out to your brain: pick me up.

5. Do it with friends.

Run clubs exploded after the pandemic, when people were desperate to get outside and connect with real people doing real things. In the book world, book clubs are quietly having the same moment, for the same reasons.

In 2024, book-club events grew 31% on Eventbrite, and silent book clubs — where you meet up to read whatever you want, together — more than doubled. Silent Book Club now counts some 2,000 chapters in 61 countries.

Book clubs are running clubs for attention. And for good reason: it’s easier to build a habit when others are depending on you. It holds you accountable — and there’s a good conversation with a friend waiting at the end of the road.

6. Train it like Couch to 5K.

Our attention spans are in the dumpster. Our capacity for deep, complex thought is being outsourced to AI, social media, and whatever other brain rot is out there.

You don’t get fit by attempting a marathon off no training. That’s a recipe for injury and burnout. You start where you are and progressively overload. Don’t jump straight to Infinite Jest or Ulysses. Start with 10 minutes a day on a short book, a novella, or an old favorite. Think of it as easy miles: a familiar route you enjoy, at a comfortable pace. As fitness builds, gradually challenge yourself and find out what kinds of workouts you like.

Concentration is a muscle. Deep reading rebuilds attention — but like running, the hardest part is getting out the door. Once you’re in a groove, you won’t turn back.

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While this might seem overly depressing, like we’re staring into the abyss of another epidemic that we can’t escape from, I was the kid reading the picture-book version of A Tale of Two Cities. Proudly gloating that I somehow got an A on the test for a book I didn’t read. Now, I read voraciously and have written five books.

Nobody is born a reader. Readers are made. They’re aided along by a teacher who hands you the right book, a parent on the couch with a paperback, and a house where books vastly outnumber screens.

Our attention muscle has been detrained. We rigged the world against it. It’s time to rig it back. The obesity epidemic taught us that willpower loses to environment every time. Fine. Then build an environment where the good thing is the easy thing.

We’ve got a choice. Is deep reading (and thinking) something we value? Or are we going to go the way of comfort, like we have in so many other aspects of life.

-Steve

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