Why you need a reading habit

Everyone can develop one but it requires willpower and discipline.

CW: this will make me seem like an intellectual snob, which I am.

If you have a reading habit, you can immediately tell whether someone you encounter reads. This sounds like a judgment, and it is; I'm not sure I can make it sound like anything else. I won’t argue that IQ differences exist among those whose brains developed on books vs screens, but they probably do. Yes, I’m being alarmist about people’s abandonment of books.

Reading allows us to absorb and connect complex ideas, and legions of people spending hours on their phones daily ultimately impoverish our politics and have contributed to the current stalemate.

I’ve spoken with many people in my orbit about their reading habits, and it would not surprise you that most don’t read. This has taken up an increasing part of my finite ability to care about the state of the world - the erosion of literacy is a ticking time bomb for our public discourse and ability to understand each other.

10 reasons to develop a reading habit

1. Mental exercises are as necessary as physical ones to keep the brain sharp, especially as we age. Cognitive degeneration is heavily related to how much you challenge yourself to think.

2. Concentration and the ability to comprehend complex ideas are related. The more you read, the better your concentration becomes, and the better your concentration, the more complicated ideas you can grasp quickly.

3. Knowledge work requires a well-exercised brain that can generate and execute ideas effectively. This also requires intense concentration.

4. Reading nonfiction widely is necessary to refine your ideas, develop your values and beliefs, and question what you hold dear.

5. Reading helps with anxiety by developing concentration, which can help regulate emotions better.

6. Learning how to live a life of virtue is impossible without reading widely. Ethics and values don’t come from the Internet’s emotional grenades; we developed these concepts because we used to value deep thought.

7. Reading widely reveals connections between ideas. This is how new ideas are born in you to share with others.

8. It makes you a more interesting conversationalist.

9. You learn to see others more deeply as the complex creatures they are.

10. If nothing else, the more you read, the better your analytical ability and the higher your likely salary ceiling. But, it should be done for reasons other than this.

The writer and intellectual

Rob Henderson

, whose work has taught me much, observes this about people who read:

In our busy and distracted society, deep reading is increasingly rare. Deep reading changes people. When you interact with people, you can tell who reads seriously and who doesn’t. This isn’t just a matter of mental ability or intelligence. There is a difference between raw cognitive horsepower and time spent immersed in complex and intricate ideas. You can tell the difference between a smart person who reads and a smart person who doesn’t by how they express ideas, the references they make, and the chains of logic they follow [emphasis mine]. The former often demonstrates a subtle understanding that weaves together insights from various domains. The latter, though sharp and quick-minded, lacks the same depth of perspective or the ability to see beyond the immediate conversation or the Current Thing. This is becoming increasingly apparent among obviously bright young adults who don’t read or read nonsense despite paying large sums of money for what should have been a decent education.

How can you develop a reading habit?

Others have explained this eloquently, but my path involved picking up something that deeply interested me, which I was excited about, and gradually reading 2 to 4 books at a time across genres. I take every opportunity to pick up a book and take my Kindle if I know I’ll have idle time. I also habitually read before bed, and it improves my sleep. Instead of the phone, I trained myself to pick up a book and see the phone as the enemy of my brain.

Here is deep life guru and computer science professor Cal Newport on reading, and he gives helpful advice about how to start:

What happened when I stopped reading

After graduate school, I stopped reading for a decade. This made me less intellectual and depressed, but I didn’t understand the connection between the two. As a child, I was the ur-bookworm, preferring to sit in the corner reading rather than talking with people because of my social anxiety. It was the ultimate escape, but it also developed my brain, and I’m writing this today. Had I not spent my childhood and early adulthood reading, I’d never have developed a love for writing.

Instead of reading after graduating, I spent constant time on Facebook, trying to find elusive belonging. In hindsight, I’m not sure why I tried so hard. Ultimately, those with whom I was trying to find ‘community' micro-canceled me—another source of depression.

In this decade, I struggled to advance in my career, had crippling anxiety and depression, and did not have control over my emotions despite professional help. Neither therapy nor psychiatric medication helped as much as physical and mental exercise.

How are these issues all connected?

I couldn’t concentrate and lacked the discipline that I have today. That is not to say I didn’t grow or gain skills, but I could have done so at a faster rate with far less anxiety and better emotional regulation.

I produced good work but couldn’t advance beyond a certain level to what LinkedIn classifies as “mid-senior level” jobs. I was spending too much time on shallow work and not enough on thinking deeply. This was intimately connected to my phone use.

I am convinced it’s possible to do well in a job with distractions and produce high-quality work by solving the most complex problems. It’s no coincidence that my problem-solving ability improved exponentially after reading became a daily discipline.

Reading builds discipline, even if you don’t have any right now. I shouldn’t have to defend the development of discipline as a value in an age in which digital communication tools have sapped our ability to concentrate, follow through with complex tasks, and grapple with challenging ideas. And yet, the left doesn’t consider discipline a desirable trait and sees it as an obstacle to living one’s own ‘best life,’ whether or not that best life benefits the person.

Yes, I’m saying that value judgments can be made about people’s decisions even though millennials and younger women insist that people should do “what feels right to them.” That’s…ridiculous because individual decisions affect society in a macroeconomic and macrosocial manner, which means all decisions are not equal if we owe something to each other.

The effects on my life

If you have mental illnesses in particular, it’s imperative to develop discipline and concentration so you can apply the willpower to follow through on actions that will help you feel better, like exercise and healthy eating. Changing these basic behaviors will make self-regulation more accessible, thus increasing your functioning in all domains. Once discipline is developed, it is a virtuous cycle. Therapy doesn’t necessarily teach you how to help yourself feel better through concrete actions. Reading is step 1 to discipline development. I’m not justifying reading as a mere means to more money and stability, though that was a welcome, unexpected side effect.

The true benefit was finding a deep life. Reading made me a better writer; the ability to communicate ideas cannot improve without the skills to absorb them deeply and make connections between them.

Quite literally, reading is responsible for my financial stability.

Effects on public discourse

The state of public discourse directly reflects the fact that people spend more time online engaging in shallow activities instead of reading deeply about their most dearly held opinions.

If we all read more widely and pressure-tested our beliefs, many of us might change our minds about many topics of social importance or at least develop some nuance.

If we don’t expose ourselves to new, especially heterodox ideas, we become accustomed to confirmation bias built into Internet communication tools. We also lose tolerance for ideas that contradict our own, which is opposed to the liberal tradition of reasoning through problems of great social importance to ensure that public conversation is nuanced (that word everyone hates).

The state of public discourse directly reflects the fact that people spend more time online engaging in shallow activities instead of reading about their closest-held opinions. If we all read more widely and pressure-tested our beliefs, many of us might change our minds about many topics of social importance or at least develop some nuance.

Most of the ardent leftists I meet who have a rigid and shallow understanding of the world around them say they’re addicted to Instagram and/or TikTok. I think it’s no accident that some of the most alarming views we’ve seen in the aftermath of recent political events have come from the online left.

The online left is just as toxic as the online right; we’re kidding ourselves by moralizing about it. The intersection of people who say things like “person experiencing homelessness” and those who advertise their traumas among those who don’t read is downright alarming. These experiences strengthen my contention that the most fallacious worldviews are the least informed by real books and most often formed by social media and short-form articles from outlets that cater to their audience's needs.

Are audiobooks and podcasts substitutes?

No; see Rob Henderson’s take on this for more:

Often, though, listening to audiobooks is accompanied by other tasks, making it harder to devote 100% of your attention to the ideas being discussed or the story being told.

Listening to audiobooks is easier. And it’s better than nothing. But if you want to seriously engage with ideas and increase the likelihood that you’ll retain knowledge, it’s better to read.

From a researcher on reading, Daniel Willingham:

It sounds as if comprehension should be easier when listening than reading, but that’s not always true. For example, one study compared how well students learned about a scientific subject from a 22-minute podcast versus a printed article. Although students spent equivalent time with each format, on a written quiz two days later the readers scored 81 percent and the listeners 59 percentt.

But even with those changes, audiobooks won’t replace print because we use them differently. Eighty-one percent of audiobook listeners say they like to drive, work out or otherwise multitask while they listen. The human mind is not designed for doing two things simultaneously, so if we multitask, we’ll get gist, not subtleties.

More importantly, when you read a book, you’re drawing upon the ability to concentrate in a way listening doesn’t naturally encourage. From neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf in conversation with Ezra Klein:

I can tell you right now what we call the Goldilocks study, where a parent reads a story. The same story is then in an audio form and just heard by the child. This is a three-year-old, or a four-year-old. Or it’s animated in a screen. Well, you know that they are paying very close attention to that screen. But what you don’t know, is if you do — or look at the activation of the language regions of the brain, under all three of those circumstances language is being activated most by when a parent or caretaker is reading that same story.

The passivity is gone out the window. There is an interactive nature to it. And there is a use of their language knowledge and their background knowledge that’s coming to bear more forcefully in that print situation and more passively in the screen situation. And so of course, you have differences in concentration. You have differences in attention. Walter Benjamin said that boredom is the hatch bird of the imagination. Well, our children, the first thing they do after they go off the screen is say, I’m bored. But this is not Walter Benjamin’s boredom. This is boredom that seeks to, if you will, assuage its need for hyperstimulation by getting more. This is something that we must figure out.

Genres and the importance of learning new ideas

Let’s now address briefly the apparent gender differences in genre preferences, which I find odd. Here is a finding from a study by the American Library Association:

In addressing the question of men and women’s preference for fiction or nonfiction, responses showed that men were almost equally divided between preferences for fiction and nonfiction titles. Women, however, displayed a strong preference for fiction, with more than double the number of women preferring fiction to nonfiction titles. Although the numbers of men and women preferring fiction were close, the number of males preferring nonfiction titles is almost double the number of women preferring nonfiction titles. A similar number of men and women did not have a preference for either fiction or nonfiction titles.

I’m not going to say you shouldn’t read fiction, but newer fiction aimed at women is at some of the lowest reading levels I’ve ever seen. I find it somewhat concerning that the biggest market for YA fiction is adult women - shouldn’t we, regardless of gender, be reading things at least at a high school level sometimes to challenge ourselves even a little bit? It’s not just about the literary register but about complexity. One should enjoy these things as part of an overall balanced literary diet. I’m reading Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn; its sentences are simple but well done. The themes are substantial, and the plot is intricately constructed at an eighth-grade reading level. Again, there is nothing wrong with easy fiction, but it shouldn’t be all we consume.

Still, it shouldn’t be dominant because we live in a complex world and because people with degrees, particularly, want to project that we’re informed about things. If you consider yourself informed or have firmly held political opinions, reading books on those topics is imperative because content from screens on complex issues of justice and social organization is shallow. Only books can encourage well-informed views because of the depth of research to which one is exposed.

Get started with small steps.

Getting started involves putting your phone far away and picking up something you’re excited to read. I promise you will not regret putting forth this effort because, in return, you will increase the depth of your life and become a more nuanced thinker. Intellectual improvement is an end in itself to pursue - the yoga of knowledge.

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