Why Everybody Stopped Reading

(banging sound) - Ah, you know, I used to be able to read big books, novels, biographies, weird philosophical stuff. It didn't matter. At one point, I read almost a hundred books in a single calendar year.

I even made a video about it. But lately, particularly in the last year or so, I've noticed that I just kind of don't read books. Well, actually, let me correct that.

It's not that I've abandoned reading books entirely, it's just that I can't seem to finish a book to save my life. And I started to think, is this just me? So I started doing some research and it turns out that it's wow, it's bad.

It's like really bad. In fact, it's so bad that college professors have recently stopped assigning full books in their curricula. Many professors say that new students can hardly handle a few pages of text without wanting a summary of it.

With all that swirling around in my head, it made me ask, what the hell's happening to our brains? Or, let's be honest, what the hell is happening to my brain? I mean, is it the fucking phones, fucking TikTok, the gravitational pull of the newsfeed, or is there some deeper force at play?

In this video, we're gonna dive into the science of trying to understand what is destroying our ability to focus and our ability to read. And some of it is probably some of the stuff that you suspected, but some of it is stuff that you've never considered before. And at the end, I'm gonna give you, and by you I mean me, some practical tips to get your attention span back and how you can start enjoying reading the big books again.

(bright music) In 2023, Netflix VP of Product, Todd Yellen, said that their data showed something new and troubling, that viewers were deciding whether to watch a television show within seven seconds of the first episode starting. That's shorter than it takes me to find the remote. As a result, Netflix has told their producers to begin crafting their shows to start mid action with someone screaming or maybe an explosion or a dead body or two.

Then there's the Associated Press. In the early 2000's, a standard AP article was around 800 words long. That's roughly three pages.

By 2014, the recommended length dropped to 500 words. That's two pages. And by 2019, their editorial guidelines suggested only 300 words or one page.

Their executive editor spelled it out in a memo, readers have changed, so we have to change. That's fancy editor speak for people have the attention spans of a fucking goldfish, so now we are going to write articles for goldfish. Most of us intuitively feel that we can't focus on anything longer than a cat video, and that's because we are constantly deluged with a never ending stream of bullshit into our eye holes.

According to one 2021 study, the average smartphone user checks their phone around 58 times a day, or approximately once every 15 minutes. The American Psychological Association said that in 2021, around 53% of US adults struggled to concentrate on anything for extended periods of time because of stress, burnout, or just constant digital distractions. So if you're on page 30 of a book and you hear your phone ding, that storyline you were just sinking into is toast.

Most people see this as a colossal failure of human willpower, but I actually think that that's the wrong way to look at it. It's more accurate to think of attention as a finite resource. When there's little information coming in, our attention gets allocated to a few things, allowing us to go deep and spend lots of time with one thing at a time.

But when there are thousands of pieces of stimulation coming in, our attention becomes fragmented and is spread thin across them all. We must choose what to pay attention to, thus causing our threshold for being willing to switch our attention to something else to be incredibly low. Everything is a war for attention, and our minds are the battlefield and guess who usually comes out on the losing end of that attention war?

(tap sound) Books. But here's the twist, researchers emphasize that while we seem scattered, we can still focus for hours on end. Hello binge watching an entire season of Stranger Things in one sitting.

It's not that our brains can't pay attention, it's that our modern tech has trained us to multi-track. We see the phone lighting up or that next recommended video, so our default becomes quick hits of dopamine, quick bursts of engagement. Reading a thick, meaty book by contrast demands that we sink into one idea for multiple hours.

And if you're used to flipping from app to app, that can feel like torture, temporarily, but we'll get to how to turn the clock back on that later on in the video. In the meantime, the bottom line is we're not literally evolving goldfish brains, we just live in an environment that fires dopamine bullets at us all day, every day, making it really hard to choose a quiet hour or two with a book. Basically, we're out of practice and it's showing, but what if we could use that same technology to put ourselves into practice?

What if we could leverage technology to make us even more focused and in flow? Well, that's exactly what the sponsor of this video does. Brain.

fm. Brain. fm has finally cracked the code on how our brains actually work and why they get distracted.

Brain. fm is creating scientifically engineered background music that literally syncs with your brainwave patterns to help optimize your attention and focus while you work. And they are legit.

They're the only music company backed by the National Science Foundation, and they have studies on their product published in Nature, which is the most prestigious academic journal in the world. Brain. fm not only offers different styles of music to listen to while you work, but they also have different states that you can turn your brain to.

So if you need to deep dive and work, there's a mode for that. If you're feeling more creative, they've got that covered. If you're having one of those days where your attention span resembles a dog on cocaine, their turbo mode is a game changer.

So if you're tired of not being able to focus long enough to read half a chapter, give Brain. fm a shot. You can unlock your brain's full potential for free for 30 days by heading the brain.

fm/idgaf. That's brain. fm/idgaf.

Stands for, I don't Give a fuck. (bright music) Let's do an experiment. I want you to think which of these two cereals would be more delicious.

Now chances are you have a preference between these two, and it's relatively simple, but imagine if magically I had 10 boxes of cereal. Now pick the most delicious one. It's a little bit more complicated, right?

Research shows that in this scenario, when you actually have more options to choose from, you're gonna be less satisfied with your final choice. This is widely known as the paradox of choice. And in a world optimized for optionality, it actually makes sense why we're both (A) crippled within decision, and (B) perpetually dissatisfied with whichever decision we inevitably make.

Now, the crazy part about the paradox of choice is that it often causes people to forego doing anything at all. In a study often called the Jam Study, researchers found that when shoppers had 24 flavors of jam to choose from, they were less likely to buy any jam at all than when they were only offered six. This is just one of many ways that abundance can actually backfire, and it raises some real philosophical conundrums.

Now, apply this to books. We have literally millions of books available to us with a few clicks of a button. So much like cereal, this one sucks.

We're never satisfied with the choice that we make, so we skim, we dabble, then eventually, you know, we read a chapter or two and then we give up. If a book doesn't hook you by chapter two, you think, eh, well, there's an ocean of other books out there, maybe the next one is my soulmate read. The huge buffet of choice leads you to graze, but not digest.

But wait, it gets worse. And no, I'm not talking about the cereal. So let's say you figure out your phone problem and you manage your cereal box insanity.

You know which books you wanna read, and you don't feel the FOMO to read anything else in print. Even then, there's a good chance that you might still be too damn tired to read. Burnout is a phenomenon that has become so normal that it's almost weird to not feel exhausted these days.

According to Gallup's 2022 report, around 76% of people experience burnout at least sometimes, and about 28% say that they're burned out all the time. Part of this is the nature of modern digital work. Cal Newport introduced the concept of slow productivity in his book of the same name, which by the way, I fucking read cover to cover.

Now he argued that the standard knowledge worker approach, little tasks scattered across your day, a thousand little slack threads, constant email pings, this creates a continual overhead tax on your brain. Even when you log off for the day, you never really log off mentally. There's always some sort of message that you should check or a project that's lurking in the back of your mind.

And these thoughts and worries will eat up your mental RAM. It's kind of like leaving 30 tabs open in your browser. That's your brain right now, draining the battery life in the background.

We inevitably try to keep up by bouncing from one micro task to the next, rarely diving deep into any of them. And by the end of the day, when you finally do wanna read for leisure, your brain is like a gray matter souffle. And in that scenario, reading sounds about as fun as chugging on a pint of dish soap.

The American Institute of Stress notes that sustained high stress impairs our ability to concentrate and remember details of things. So if you do force yourself to read after a long stressful day, it's likely that you're gonna forget half of what you just read, meaning you need to go back and read the same page again and again and again. The result, frustration, even less inclination to keep going.

Cue the Netflix binge and doom scrolling Instagram for the night. Now look, I do creative work for a living, so there are days I can handle 20 different script ideas, 10 different email threads, three Zoom meetings, and bang out a video like this one, all in the same afternoon. And by evening, my brain is hitting the reset button.

I might still wanna read, but I open a book and I stare at it for like two minutes, realize I've reread the same paragraph three times and then default to YouTube or something else that requires zero cognitive effort. If that's you, trust me, you're not alone. This is the modern brain, battered by notifications, half baked by to-do lists, and a permanent sense that we're behind on something.

Reading, by contrast, demands a singular focus, an increasingly scarce resource. Don't worry, there's hope, but first, I actually have a little bit of a spicy take here that you may or may not agree with. (piano music) Look, I get all these arguments.

Hell, I've been hearing about our dwindling attention span since I was in college, which that was a long time ago, but I persevered. I survived the birth of the internet, kids. I lived through the emergence of social media.

I made it work with my Smartphone. Through all of those years I read heavy ass books. But in the last six to 12 months, something has changed.

It's basically wrecked any ability I have to finish a long nonfiction book. You may know where this is going. I'm talking about AI.

I'm using it every day, almost constantly. And the more I rely on it, the less patience I have for reading a big door stop of a nonfiction book. Think about it, a book might be 300 pages with maybe 50 to 60 pages of pure gold and 250 pages of the author's bullshit filler.

Come on, we all know it's true, but guess what? AI can take you straight to the 50 pages of gold, over and over and over again. And if you're like me, then suddenly, now when you try to read, your brain starts saying, wait, why am I bothering with this section?

Why do I wanna read this chapter? Why do I care about this guy's life story? And boom, phone comes back out.

Next thing I know, I'm talking to ChatGPT, and this is way different than TikTok or the Smartphone or hell, even the internet in general. Yes, those things are all distracting, but they weren't distracting you with good information, they were distracting you with bullshit. AI on the other hand, isn't distracting me from the book.

I actually feel like AI is teaching me more than most books. So honestly, I'm not even sure I feel bad about this. I love books.

Books have given me everything I have in my life. I've got a big library at home full of them. I've even written a few of them if you haven't noticed.

But maybe it's inevitable that the book as we know it is on the road to being supplanted by something more agile, more personalized, and less linear. If I can get my research fixed in a hyper targeted way, my ADHD laced brain is gonna be happy. Why read 200 pages on marketing strategy when a chat bot can spit out the key concepts, references and examples and apply it to my business personally in a matter of minutes?

That's the real reason that I suspect that reading is hitting a new low, or at least is about to. And it's not reading per se, it's books. Books as a technology are the undefeated champions of knowledge transference for more than 500 years, but that might actually be changing.

So what do we do now? Do we just bury our books in the backyard, build an altar to AI and sacrifice a goat to the great algorithm? Well, hold up.

If you wanna read more books, and there are still plenty of books that you should be reading, there are ways to reclaim that focus. First off, a big misconception. Once your attention span is fried, it's gone forever.

That is garbage. Your attention is like a muscle. Right now you might be sprinting from one app to another like a chihuahua in a crack house, but with the right exercises, you can slow down and get that deeper concentration back.

And second, you should want your attention span back because the longer your attention span, the more effective you'll be at creative tasks, problem solving, and the less likely you'll be to suffer from burnout. So here's some practical ways that you can actually get that attention span back. Digital detox time blocks.

You've heard this before, but it's worth repeating. Choose a specific window, maybe an hour, maybe a day, maybe a week. Turn the fucking phone off or at least put it in Do Not Disturb mode.

Delete a bunch of apps. Keep it physically outside of your reach, and during that block, commit to no screens. And then go read War and Peace like a good little boy or girl.

Or go for a walk. See people, you know, like be face to face, like a happy human. Over time, extend these blocks if you can.

Comfy chair, comfy mind strategy. Reading in bed while half asleep and mentally drained might be setting yourself up for failure. Try creating a reading zone, a cozy chair by a window or somewhere with minimal noise.

Bring a drink of choice, you know, coffee or tea or like a Red Bull and vodka. And then make reading a ritual that you experience for pleasure and not just a chore. Then you're gonna be more likely to stick with it.

Set micro targets and reward yourself. Instead of saying, I need to read 50 pages every day or I'm a fucking loser, try five pages, then celebrate finishing that small goal by, I don't know, get up, grab a snack, do some stretches. A lot of us sabotage ourselves with giant, unrealistic reading goals.

A series of small wins leads to bigger wins down the line. Book clubs or reading buddies. Accountability is everything.

Find a friend in real life or online and pick a book to read together. Discuss it once a week. That social pressure can push you to keep turning pages when you've otherwise quit and binge random cooking shows on YouTube.

So yes, our technology has changed how we consume information, and yes, AI can distill knowledge in the quick bullet points, but there's still that special magic in letting an author's ideas invade and soak themselves in your brain, watching them unfold slowly page by page, especially if the writer's got some perspectives and insights that can enrich your life in a way that summaries can't. So if you miss reading books like I do and you miss that satisfying feeling of finishing a book and thinking, wow, that was actually worth it, try these steps because you can recondition your brain and in a world that's always pushing for faster, shorter, more, more, more, maybe the real power move is to slow down.