The World Is Aflame Because People Have Stopped Reading

The Greatest Act of Self-Harm Is Choosing Not to Read

Michael B. Jordan in Fahrenheit 451 (2018)

Today brings another painfully embarrassing take, this one courtesy of “Gun Lover’s Club,” an account with over 800,000 followers on Twitter. In response to a post claiming that Gen Z is abandoning reading “in record numbers,” Gun Lover writes:

“Reading books is seriously overrated these days. People act like cracking open a 400-page book is the only path to wisdom or success, but honestly, in 2026 you can pretty much just ask Grok anything you want to know.”

Where to begin? One might accuse me of selectively spotlighting the worst opinions online, but sadly Gun Lover’s perspective is increasingly common among the tech-addled. Hugely popular conservative influencer Tim Pool recently tweeted, “Universal literacy was a mistake.” A worrying number of adults on TikTok admitted that they are struggling to finish reading Wuthering Heights because it’s “too hard.” In the past several months I’ve been informed that “there’s no point in teaching Canterbury Tales to high school kids,” that if students are exposed to new things it will make them hate learning, that using print dictionaries and reading on the subway are “performative” & pretentious (but being on your phone is not). This morning the Washington Post announced that it will be ending its books coverage, and there are currently about a hundred folks in my mentions explaining to me why this is right and good. As someone else noted, the idea that reading is a waste of time has become the functional mindset of most people, whether or not they admit it.

And look, I haven’t completely given up hope that reading will have a revival—especially as AI makes the internet effectively unusable, driving growing numbers of people offline. There are reasons for hope. Schools are banning phones, whole countries (Australia, the Netherlands, France, Spain) have banned social media for kids and teens in the past couple months. Parents seem to be waking up to the fact that they shouldn’t hand tablets to their babies fresh from the womb. (The baddie in the upcoming Toy Story 5 is a child’s tablet.) Anecdotally I’ve seen people saying that Gen Alpha reads more than Gen Z because they haven’t been wholly raised online. We’re seeing significant cultural pushback against the presumptions of Big Tech that they should own your children from the cradle.

We’re at an inflection point, and as I see it, there are two paths open to us. Either we’ll continue to resist the encroachments of tech, acknowledge that a life without hobbies or books is a half-life at best, organize to keep data centers out of our towns and refuse to let AI take over the film and publishing industries... or we won’t. Maybe the forces currently arrayed against us are simply too powerful. Maybe the majority of people want a machine to answer their texts and emails, to write their eulogies, to impersonate their dead loved ones. Maybe future generations of students will sail through school without having read anything, written anything, learned anything. Maybe Gun Lover will have his or her way and Grok will replace bookstores and libraries. Maybe curiosity and learning will come to be seen as relics of an earlier time.

In which case, we are slouching rapidly towards Fahrenheit 451.

And I can’t force you to pick up a book. I’m not going to stand over you imploring you to read Dickens in the night hours as you stare glass-eyed at your screen. But don’t delude yourself that this is progress. Once we had a society in which the overwhelming majority of people were literate; in which children of ten routinely read books by Chesterton and Defoe; in which coal miners built and maintained their own lending libraries; in which it was not unusual for a soldier to write home to his lover, “My love for you is deathless, it seems to bind me to you with mighty chains that nothing but Omnipotence could break.” That society was built by mass literacy, and without literacy, everything that we love—empathy, journalism, democracy, the arts, romance, passion—will be lost. Even if you’re not a reader, you don’t want to live in a world in which most people are unable to read. It will affect you in ways that you currently can scarcely imagine.

As Roger Ebert said shortly before his death, “I sometimes think that we have seen a great civilization destroyed in our lifetimes.”

There’s still time to reverse course, but it would require a commitment to learning and the pursuit of knowledge that few of us are currently demonstrating. Maybe the act of reading daily can’t stave off the apocalypse; but maybe it can, if enough of us begin doing it. The most powerful men in our country have sunk enormous fortunes into making you illiterate, lonely, and perpetually online. They want you friendless and dumb; they want you incapable of having or expressing a single thought. In this climate, against these forces, the ultimate act of resistance is reading; and a revival of literacy may be the only way to prevent the dystopia they are so keen to inflict.