The Decline of Reading for Pleasure
The decline of reading for fun is undeniable. In the last 20 years, the number of Americans who read for pleasure has nearly halved. When people do pick up a book, they choose something shorter and simpler. I’m no different—these days I read far more short books than long ones. My attention span, like many others, has shrunk since Covid.
This trend predates social media. When Amazon’s bestseller lists first took off in the UK, they were dominated by Jeremy Clarkson’s The World According To… series and Andy McNab’s SAS thrillers.
Different topics, but one thing in common: both written with a very low reading age. Publishing has a name for this—HI/LO, “high interest, low readability.” Every year, bestseller charts are packed with HI/LO books.
Writing for Shorter Attention Spans
When I started this blog in 2017, I wrote long-form essays, sometimes thousands of words. Now, I post more frequently but write shorter pieces. The total number of words I produce hasn’t matched the increase in posts.
Why? Because the way people read has changed. Analytics show that almost all my readers now come via phones, not laptops or tablets. Smaller screens mean shorter attention spans, shorter articles. I even use AI to sub-edit and improve readability, which trims things further.
Glowing screens are addictive. I’ll catch myself checking my phone in the supermarket queue, or scrolling Twitter while half-watching TV. That constant distraction is reshaping how we consume information.
The Decline of Reading and the Loss of Reality
The decline of reading has deeper consequences. As people abandon longer fiction and non-fiction, we lose something vital: the ability to separate reality from fantasy, truth from lies. Imagination is a muscle—if we only feed it short videos and memes, we lose the capacity to test ideas, to explore what might be true, to see reality more clearly.
As reading simplifies, so do our thoughts. We gravitate towards short sentences, simple slogans, and easy solutions. We no longer want to grapple with long passages of detail or complex arguments. Anything not spoon-fed becomes a blur of long words and difficult numbers.
The result? When simple solutions fail to fix complex problems, we throw tantrums. We demand a new government that promises even quicker, even simpler fixes.
Paralysis in an Age of Complexity
This is dangerous because we’re making decisions today that will shape generations to come. Climate change, artificial intelligence, and the survival of liberal democracy—these are problems measured not in years but in centuries.
And yet we aren’t really making decisions at all. We are paralysed, overwhelmed by information, unable to cope with concepts that don’t fit neatly into a 500-word explainer with the key points in bold.
Worse still, we’re questioning whether democracy itself is too much effort. Liberal democracy requires disagreement, yes—but it also requires that we share some fundamental agreements: that truth and lies are not the same thing, that facts matter, and that they can be tested through science and free debate. Without that foundation, democracy collapses into authoritarianism.
Britain’s Literary Tradition Under Threat
The decline of reading is especially dangerous in Britain, where our literary tradition is a vital part of our identity. From Bede to Blake and Shelley, Shakespeare to Orwell, Britain has a heritage of thought and language that shaped the modern world. That tradition gave us the Beatles and Ray Davies. It gave us satire, protest, imagination.
But as our connection to that tradition weakens, so do we. In its place, we get the empty posturing of nationalism and authoritarianism: cheap flags, shallow memes, endless online hysteria. The bulldog breed and the blitz spirit replaced with bad grammar and bad faith.
If we allow the decline of reading to continue, we risk losing not just literature, but democracy itself.
And Britain goes with it