I know a lot of people who read very little. They can read. But they choose not to. Because they don’t really want to. Because they don’t like it. And to be fair, reading is up against some pretty stiff competition … there’s sports, going out, fishing, television, traveling, spending time with family and friends …
But if we will consider it, life is a lot about balance and having the right things in the right place in your life. So it’s not like one thing can replace all the other things. And reading is different, right. If you think about it reading is listening to others. And you get to do it in a peaceful, controlled environment. And they get to speak to us about things they have researched well and thought through deeply (unless you’re junk reading). You’ve got to like that!
Apart from my rather anecdotal observations indicating most people don’t read a whole lot, I was recently reading some US stats on adult literacy that Wyatt Graham shared on his feed. I’ll share a few of them with you:
– About 130 million American adults read below a sixth-grade level. That’s over half the population.
– One out of five adults in the US are classified as functionally illiterate – “unable to complete basic reading tasks.”
– Adults scoring in the lowest literacy levels increased 9 percentage points between 2017 and 2023.
This gives us an interesting picture, and the Canadian stats show us pretty close to the same situation as 48% of Canadians are considered to have inadequate literacy skills and 38% are reading at level 3, which is considered the minimum required for coping with everyday life.
But the fascinating questions that arise from these findings involve not only where this is all taking us, but also why is it happening. I strongly suspect that reading rates began their sharp decline with the advent of television, coinciding with the very early days of my childhood. Over the years I’ve had a front row seat to the phenomenon that is TV. And where are we now?
“Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.” Derek Thompson
So, people haven’t just given up on reading, have we. We’ve exchanged it for a faster, easier, and presumably much better way of taking in information and processing it. It could be argued. And perhaps, as a result we are less literate but more knowledgeable than those who have gone before us. It could be argued. And you might actually think such a thing. But it doesn’t appear to be the case.
Oxford’s word of the year for 2024 was ‘brain rot’, defined as, “Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration.”
Andrew Wilson wrote this last month (December 2025) that “More than twenty-four thousand minutes of new user video is uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day.”
These are all hard numbers to wrap your head around. But is this some kind of crisis or a tempest in a teapot? I know that throughout history there has been a large swath of people unable to read. Whether it was the absence of reading materials available (i.e. before the invention of the printing press) or a lack of education (literacy), for much of history the average person has not read a lot. And a great number of those people lived very healthy and productive lives.
So let’s just say it – the ability to read and write is not the most important thing. But it’s hard to look at literacy and not recognize the immense value it has for us both personally and as a society.
Larry Osborne makes a case in his book, ‘Contrarian’s Guide to Knowing God’ for pulling back on our expectations of academics making for better people. And there is a case to be made.
None the less, at the end of the day, reading is a complex learned behaviour that becomes more and more a virtue. It becomes a virtue as it allows us to simply listen to others; others who have gone before, others who are traveling alongside us (our generation), others who can help us on the way. Language is involved. But it’s one of those things where you get out of it in accordance with what you put in.
Enjoyed this Steve.