Your first impulse upon seeing this article may be scrolling to the bottom to see how long it is. Since this is short and sweet, you might read it. Every time a professor assigns you an optional reading for class, the question isn't whether or not you'll do it -- it's what you'll do instead. Every time you actually do read the textbook, five minutes seems like an hour. You'll get through a dense paragraph that makes your head ache as much as a massive hangover, just to realize you have 300 more paragraphs, and you give up instead of reading through it.
I'm speaking from personal experience and the accounts shared by many friends to describe a pattern: many of us don't like to read anymore. Especially with the technological innovation occurring throughout our generation, books, articles, newspapers seem to have taken a backseat to laptops, smartphones, and TV. When was the last time you read a book for fun? I hope that you didn't laugh when you read that question like I did.
Instead of reading an article about Hillary's email scandal, or actually reading Apple's letter to its customers regarding the San Bernardino case, you might just get a friend to summarize it for us instead. When doing a mandatory reading, you might notice your mind wandering to every other possible thing you could be doing at that moment. You wonder why you can't seem to concentrate and go on WebMD and Psych forums trying to figure out if you legitimately have ADD.
Many of us sometimes can't read for 10 minutes without falling asleep, and that's actually useful to put us to sleep at night. How many books have you read cover to cover the past year? I hope you didn't laugh at that question, too. So what's the problem? Why don't we read anymore?
It's no coincidence that our drastic decrease in reading has come with a new technological era full of distraction. With distractions come multi-tasking, believing that we can read a textbook and be active in a group chat at the same time. PsychologyToday estimates that productivity decreases 40 percent when we multi-task. Every time we get a message or update and our phone alerts us, we get a dopamine rush that compels us to check what that email or text was. We get drawn something else, anything else besides what we were reading.
Our disinterest in reading may also stem from being forced to read certain books and works in our education system. Of course, we're not going to be interested in every single thing we read. Instead of reading a book off the shelves of a series of our favorite genre, our teachers make us read classic literature to make us educated. When we have to read it, chances are we're not doing it because we're interested. Grinding our way through the book, we develop an aversion to the whole experience of reading because each page feels like an hour, which subsequently draws away the interest that got us into books in the first place. We replace them with the previously noted television, video games, and social media for the same lost stimulation.
If you made it this far down the article, congratulations. You read much farther than I would have if I hadn't written this myself.
