I have never read a book in my life. I might as well be illiterate, and most people around me might as well be too. Most libraries are vacant, and bookstores are gone. But all these people are doing fine - we put anything down on paper, and despite its incoherence it seems fine by standards that have stooped for reasons I do not know. I can turn in something that makes absolutely no sense, and an instructor from a decent school will tell me that he enjoyed it. Or an instructor won’t enjoy it, but since most people don’t write anything comprehensible anymore I’ll still be fine. I can cruise through my education and get a job while barely having read much at all. Everyone frequents some variant of flimsy entertainment - cable news, cartoons, social media - so why bother trying to read anything worthwhile anyways if nobody else is? Does reading actually make you more curious, more intelligent, more human?
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Notes -
Two things:
People vastly overestimate the amount of information on the internet. Nowadays I get most of my reading from the internet, but when I open a real book, written to be inform attentive readers, the amount of detail there is usually literally amazing. Quite apart from the density mentioned by the others, the quality of the information is just so much higher than you can get anywhere else.
I don't know if you've traveled much, but people who have traveled generally agree that traveling is good for you in many ways. The problem is that if someone tries to explain to someone who hasn't traveled how much traveling can change, enrich, and expand your perspective on the world, they just end up sounding like a pompous boob. Reading is the same. At the risk of sounding like a pompous boob, I object to the idea that "all these people are doing just fine." It seems to me that huge numbers of people suffer from narrow global outlooks, shortened historical outlooks, confused scientific outlooks, facile religious outlooks, and self-serving philosophical outlooks. This all combines in a soup of error and small-souledness, and while I don't claim to be feasting on a stew of truth and magnanimity, I notice many differences between my life and the lives of people who don't read, just as a gym-rat notices many differences between himself and people who don't lift. Mottistes will doubtless insist that reading correlates with IQ, and IQ with a lack of error and small-souledness, but my IQ was what it was long before I devoted my life to extreme reading. That time of my life is over now- I have kids, and a job, etc, so I read a lot less and I notice that I used to just be . . . better. If you are the average of the people you hang out with, it pays to hang out with the best thinkers we know of, through the Magic Of Books!
Note: I'm talking here about philosophy and history and economics and science and uppercase-L Literature. Not Game of Thrones or Jack Reacher. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but as a pompous boob, I've just never tried it.
I like to think of things like game of thrones and jack reacher as gateway drugs to the good stuff you mentioned in your note. After all, at least half of, if not more capital L Literature started off as pulp trash for plebs. For someone who has never read a book, I expect jumping straight into Aurelius or Camus would be kind of daunting, or maybe straight up off putting.
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