Why do so many young people seem to antibook or antireading?
I constantly hear things like;
>I'm not a book person
>I'm just not into reading
>I can't get into the stories
Like, are these people just intellectually fucked? I know plenty of seemingly intellectual people who are non-readers, is their intellect all a ruse?
they aren't socialized to read on their own time but they still feel guilty about it and need to come up with hand-wavy reasons for why they dont because theyre miserable wrecks tormented by inconsistent and conflicting ideals on all sides
Sides? Yeah, I'll have Italian Wedding soup, please.
Haha hell yeah, I was young, I felt this once.
reading takes a lot of effort. when things like tv and cell phones and video games and facebook exist.. not surprising someone doesnt wanna spend 12 hours discovering a story
Couple of reasons I'd say, you need to somewhat think to read which a lot of people don't seem to like doing. You don't get the same instant gratification from reading that you would get from movies and video games, it requires a lot of time spent alone, which a lot of "normies" would rather not do. When people tell you they don't like reading, they usually mean it and I can understand why if all you've known are movies and video games where you get much more in you face excitement.
They have better things to do..like updating their instagram or tweeting their feelings.
Reading isn't socially seen as Cool or anything
Being smart on the internet is the Cool thing to do now
Why read a book when you can just wiki anything and come across as a smart guy on the internet without actually understanding any of the information you're parroting
Why care?
blowing up a zeppelin in battlefield 1 produces loads more dopamine than reading a static page
>Why do so many young people seem to antibook or antireading?
I see less of this and more of "the only lit books I am capable of talking about are by Camus or Vonnegut"
I like to be able to discuss lit in real life as well as on Prussian Soapbox Speech Making Boards
>Like, are these people just intellectually fucked?
yes
> I know plenty of seemingly intellectual people who are non-readers, is their intellect all a ruse?
yes
t. former/rehabilitating reader
it is no coincidence that my life/mind turned for the worse when I stopped reading around age 16
Some great minds can't get into literature.
Some great minds can't get into math.
Some great minds can't get into pussy.
There will always be people to discuss literature with in a meaningful way if you make the effort to find them. I reiterate, there is no reason to care.
Reading isn't some miracle cure for being a moron. Sorry.
A G R E E D W I T H
/thread
I'm not a book person when it comes to fiction, I read very little of it. If I were asked to chime in on a discussion on literature in that sense, I'd just sound like a retard. So the easier answer for everyone is "I don't really read that stuff, sorry."
I read plenty of non fiction though. Philosophy, history, etc.
>Reading isn't some miracle cure for being a moron. Sorry.
no dumb dumb. I'm not implying causailty; just corrolation
I started making poorer decisions, more short sighted thinking, smaller mindsets, and less productive patterns of behavior the same time I stopped reading as a hobby or even seriously for academics
people who enjoy reading are simply better at thinking.
Honestly I think video games, cell phones, internet and other things have messed with our attention spans. I honestly will say i'm not a very prolific reader, but I read a few books every now and then. I've tried to get some of my friends to read and they just never actually do it. I can't even get them to read a short story that takes 10-15 minutes of time. One friend told me he started reading a short story and would finish it at a later time. Like wtf it takes all of 10 minutes to read the story and you have to finish it later?
Reading was never popular. Like, seriously, it was never a popular thing that people did out of enjoyment.
Before TV (and before TV had programming all hours of the day), you couldn't easily fill every hour of your existence. The average person would just talk to people; the quiet/shy person would read books. Now, there's TV, internet, and so on and so forth; even among the quieter forms of entertainment, you still have magazines, comic books, and a plethora of genre fiction, past and present.
I personally don't think this modern situation is due to fried attention spans. Rather, reading has *always* sucked and always been difficult , but the reason why people stuck through it was because it was one of the few forms of entertainment and/or books were occasionally hot topics. Now that the reasons to read are few and far, people simply don't do it.
>I'm not implying causailty
>corrolation
>people who enjoy reading are simply better at thinking.
Okay I'm done here.
well, if by books you mean a number of pieces of paper bound in a certain way, then it's worth noting that the discursive field encompasses much more media than that today. you can still engage ideas in a meaningful way if they aren't presented in that very specific format. that idea is an artifact of an era where that was the only recording media available.
Personally, I don't like to sound pretentious so when someone asks if I read I say no. It's all subjective, anyway. By my standards, if I haven't read a book a day, I haven't really read. So I tell the truth.
Start reading then. Or stop lying.
>By my standards, if I haven't read a book a day, I haven't really read
But that's fucking retarded.
Pretty simple I'd say. I don't think many would argue with the idea that millennials are accustomed to instant gratification now when it comes to entertainment and it's changing the way our brains work.
"The results showed the average human attention span has fallen from 12 seconds in 2000, or around the time the mobile revolution began, to eight seconds. Goldfish, meanwhile, are believed to have an attention span of nine seconds."