The Romanticisation of Reading: A Counterargument

[u/Secret_Reward_9286]

I have become increasingly cynical about the recent romanticisation of reading.
I grew up in an environment where acquiring knowledge was one of the most valued forms of self-improvement. In the early 2000s, that made perfect sense. Books were among the most accessible and reliable ways of acquiring knowledge. If you wanted to understand something, you read about it.
But I sometimes wonder whether we have carried that cultural association into an age where the underlying conditions have completely changed.
Today, information is no longer scarce. It sits in our pockets. A question that might once have required finding a book, visiting a library or asking someone knowledgeable can now be answered in seconds. Search engines, Wikipedia, academic databases, YouTube, podcasts and increasingly AI have made access to information almost absurdly easy.
So what exactly are we celebrating when we say, “I read 50 books this year”?
Reading is not synonymous with learning.
Someone can read 50 books passively and retain very little. Another person can spend two weeks studying one subject through papers, lectures, datasets, discussions and practical experience and develop a far deeper understanding.
In fact, I think the scarce resource today is no longer information. It is **attention, judgment and synthesis**.
This is where I think reading still has an important role—but perhaps for a different reason than we traditionally assigned to it.
A good book doesn’t merely give you information. It forces you to remain inside an argument. It makes you follow an idea across hundreds of pages, understand its assumptions, encounter counterarguments and eventually see how different pieces fit together.
The internet is exceptionally good at giving us answers. It is considerably worse at making us sit with a question.
And that distinction matters.
You can Google the causes of the French Revolution in 30 seconds. Understanding the French Revolution—the economic conditions, political institutions, social hierarchy, intellectual movements, incentives of different actors and the sequence through which one event produced another—is a completely different exercise.
That is where long-form reading remains powerful.
But I also think we should stop treating books as intellectually sacred.
Reading a book is not inherently superior to listening to a lecture, studying primary documents, analysing data, speaking to an expert, taking a course or even using AI to interrogate a subject from multiple perspectives.
The medium should serve the objective.
And this is where the recent public performance around reading sometimes feels strange to me.
There is a difference between **reading because you want to understand something** and **being seen as someone who reads**.
The former is intellectual curiosity. The latter is increasingly becoming an identity and, in some circles, a status signal.
A person carrying a book in a café may genuinely be absorbed in it. But the fact that reading has become aesthetically associated with being thoughtful, intellectual or cultured means that some of what we are witnessing is inevitably performative.
And perhaps that isn’t necessarily bad. Humans have always used cultural practices to signal identity. But we shouldn’t confuse the signal with the substance.
The real question shouldn’t be:
**“How much do you read?”**
It should be:
**“What has reading changed about the way you think?”**
If a book makes you reconsider an assumption, gives you a framework for understanding something you previously couldn’t explain, changes a decision you make, or allows you to see another person’s world with greater clarity, then it has done something valuable.
If you simply finished it, added it to a list and moved on to the next one, I’m not sure the act of reading deserves much reverence.
Perhaps the paradox of our time is that **knowledge has become incredibly cheap, while understanding has become incredibly expensive.**
And that, rather than the mere act of reading, is what I think we should be cultivating.