The greatest danger facing a nation is sometimes not visible in the streets, but it seemingly and quietly develops in the mind of its people. A nation can survive wars, even economic collapse. But, it will never be able to endure the death of curiosity. And curiosity dies when people stop reading. Yes, you read it clearly—when people stop reading. Reading has proved to have done miracles—oh, near miracles. A reader while sitting under a candle lit room could travel across different continents, enter into the forgotten civilizations, can sit with Santiago in his ship while he struggles to catch a fish (The Old Man and the Sea), converse with Gregor Samsa who has recently transformed into an insect (Metamorphosis), and vividly experience holocaust with Primo Levi (If this is a Man).

Call it a tragedy. Yes, a slow and brewing but engulfing tragedy waiting to culminate at a point—yet, no one knows when or how; it is certain to happen at a point. With the blessings of technology, attention has become the rarest commodity available. We have, indeed, a plethora of information in our palm or in our pocket—thank you, technology, for this blessing—but attention and curiosity have taken a back seat. Sitting far behind—so far that the wisest eyes cannot feel their presence or see their absence. If reading has been the engine of curiosity and thinking, why has that engine weakened today? The answer lies not in the disappearance of books or shortage of libraries but in the endless digital distraction. Yes, our cherished digital progress has brought comfort but also endless distraction. Reading has undoubtedly become one of its prime victims. Our phones have engulfed most of our attention while pushing back critical thinking and discouraging reading. Accept it or not, it has become the new normal. For example, observe any restaurant or a family gathering today. One theme is prominent and you can see it clearly: every face is illuminated by a screen. Ten years ago, this situation had been different. You would have seen someone reading, or actually arguing with a friend about something that mattered. Family gathering would have been about gossips and conversation. But, the screen has taken all of it—including reading. We rarely pick up a book. Feel its warmth. Turn a page. Highlight a sentence. Fight with a paragraph over comprehension. Download a MOBI version of a book to read it on our Kindle devices. And summarize a chapter. Why? Why have we become so busy? Is it the new abyss we are walking into?

Importance of Reading:

What an invention a book is. It does something remarkably rare—it makes us to stand with soldiers in a war, share the grief of Mariam in Kabul who endures pain at the hands of Rasheed in A Thousand Splendid Suns, witness the betrayal friendship between Hassan and Amir in The Kite Runner, feel the loneliness and enduring pain felt by Jude in A Little Life, and enter in the life of Anne Frank in The Diary of a Young Girl. A book is not only a combination of different chapters but also a vivid experience. Reading lets us to borrow someone else’s eyes, feel their suffering and experience a life that is not ours. For example, through reading, you might be a soldier hiding in a trench, become a survival who has few food left, be a servant who has never been asked what she wants, dwell in the mountains of Alps, become a prisoner who awaits freedom, and become a refugee waiting for the war to end. Reading opens the heart and mind. It expands our cognitive abilities and pushes our imagination boundaries beyond the room we are sitting in. Isn’t it a miracle? Words carry you away into different eras, continents, civilizations, and minds.

Why have people stopped?

Many experts have attempted to answer this question differently. Some have explained the complex reasons associated with declining reading culture. By the way, you already, to some extent, know the major contributing factor to why people have stopped reading. Yes, you have guessed it correctly—our smartphones. The very smartphone on which you are reading these words. Smartphones have replaced many things around us, including wristwatches, television, radio, tape recorder, video camera, and—indeed—books. The modern digital environment provided by our smartphones has trained us to reward distraction rather than concentration. For instance, the reels and short clips have trained our minds to explore entertainment endlessly. People prefer immediate stimulation over delayed intellectual satisfaction. We avoid reading longer texts on Social Media because longer texts bore us, but we watch reels endlessly because our minds have become addicted to dopamine hits. Books require patience to read and understand. The digital culture has prepared our mind to abandon anything that does not immediately stimulate us. Why should you read a long text on Facebook while you can scroll through reels and entertain yourself—because your mind has become addicted to endless entertainment and dopamine hits? Why bore oneself?

What needs to be done: Reclaiming Reading Culture?

The question is not that we should abandon technology because it has affected reading culture. It should not disappear, nor can it. Technology has given us those comforts that our previous generation could hardly have imagined. The point is to draw a distinction with technology: whether we allow it to dictate our thinking capacity and concentration.

We have to reclaim boredom

The first and foremost step is to read thoroughly. Although we do read, we are reading comments, notifications, captions, and headlines on social media. We do skim through newspapers and convince ourselves that we have read it. This is not the way. Skimming through summaries and chapters is not good for building curiosity; we have to pick a book. Give it time. Give it our undivided attention. Struggle with a paragraph. Underline important sentences. Allow the flow of thought and stay with the story. In this way, we can rebuild the habit of reading.

Secondly, we have to reclaim boredom. You might think this is a radical thought. But boredom does something amazing and useful. How? Think for a while and recall—when was the last time you were bored and didn’t reach for your phone. Can you? We have filled every gap with a screen and boredom rarely gets a chance to happen anymore. And when boredom does, thirty seconds later we are scrolling. If we reclaim boredom, mind starts working on its own. We begin to think. We might plan something. We might ponder about a situation. We might question an idea. All great ideas were invented when people were bored, and a flood of thought was in their minds. Boredom will push you to read. To think. To ask. To analyze. To see beyond ordinary. Boredom awakens our curiosity. It will compel you to pick a book. To read.

Lastly, it is not too late. Families can take an active part in reclaiming the culture of reading. It starts at a young age. A kid who grows up around book, who sees parents talking about a novel instead of starring at the phone, picks up the culture of reading. A child who sees books around every corner of the house and adults reading for pleasure would automatically develop the habit.  The child would treat reading as a natural process rather than a punishment. Schools and academies should also encourage students to read apart from giving them notes and summaries.

Conclusion:

So, yes—people have largely stopped reading. Phones have taken the space left by book and something, very important, essence is being lost in the process—the end of curiosity. When people stop reading, they stop being curious, they stop entering into other worlds, and start giving room to ignorance. They stop questioning what they have always believed. And the imagination remains stagnant, ignorance flourishes, empathy becomes fragile, and curiosity fades. This is the reason claiming reading is not only about saving books. It is about saving us. Books have survive wars. They have survived censorship, and revolutions. What they cannot survive is—us? When we lose the interest of reading, when we do not open them anymore, and trade them with a scroll. They might not survive this. By embracing the modern digital and neglecting reading, we are shrinking our cognitive imagination. The point here is not that to read is to become knowledgeable or intelligent. It is that we should read not to make our world too small. We should read because somewhere at a particular time period another life is waiting to be understood. And that is where curiosity begins. With a book. By turning a page. By engaging with the text. And connecting with the theme.

Let’s aim to pick a book. And explore the world while sitting in a room.

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