Why Don’t People Read Anymore?

Reading has always been a sign of being smart. If you read a book while taking the metro, people look at you more respectfully than if you are playing Candy Crush. But if you’re not so much of a reader, does it automatically make you a small-minded person?

Credit: Fabiola Peñalba on Unsplash

I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I was dreaming about a small house somewhere in a small town, where I write books, drink dark black tea, buy fresh bread in the corner bakery, and travel everywhere to write something refreshingly new from time to time. Since I started blogging, my dream faded a little. When I was proudly showing my friends my brand new article, most of them just skimmed it, they didn’t read the whole thing. And they were my friends, what could I say about unknown people from anywhere? So is it impossible to become a writer because people don’t read anymore?

Our world is moving so fast that people don’t have time to catch up with the latest news, forget about a 600-page book. It’s much faster and easier to watch a YouTube video or a movie than to spend some time to actually read. But that doesn’t mean the world is becoming less smart. You can get so much information from so many sources that sometimes it’s confusing. When you wake up and open your Instagram, thousands of stories, commercials and posts break into your life. The most important thing is to filter the information and be critical about everything you see. In the times of Pushkin nobody had a Facebook profile where anyone can share any poem and get an immediate response.

My point is the world is changing so fast that we have to follow. It doesn’t make us less useful or less smart. It makes us multi-tasking, self-improving, world-changing, it makes us who we are right now. And there are still bookstores that you can barely enter right before Christmas because of the influx of shoppers and metro-readers (me!) who read only in the metro but considering the time spent in there, you can call them bookworms. I’ll get back to my blogging attempts and hope that someone will read it. After all, when else will people have time to read if not right now?

Cover photo by Fabiola Peñalba on Unsplash

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