For most of ancient history, reading was treated as a crime. Not always by law, but by design, it was kept out of reach, locked away in temples and monasteries, guarded like a secret too dangerous for common hands. In medieval times, it fared little better: a privilege reserved for the elites in power, while the masses were kept ignorant on purpose. This was never an accident. It was a brazen practice to control and subdue, to limit the ability to think, to question, to access knowledge of the world beyond what they were told. And yet the human mind was never built for that kind of constraint. We are programmed to learn, to be curious, to understand how the world moves around us. Learning is a basic human instinct.
Today, we finally have the access our ancestors were denied – the world quite literally within our fingertips, and still we barely take the time to read. Life today moves too fast for stillness. Between the scrolling, the noise, and the never-ending urgency of staying updated, our attention spans have shrunk to fit whatever fits on a screen in fifteen seconds. Recent surveys tell us the average person reads just one book a year. One. After centuries of fighting for the right to read, we now have it in abundance and use it the least.
And when we do read, we are still judged for what we choose. Read only non-fiction, and you’re too practical, too dry, perhaps a bit of a bore. Read only fiction, and you’re accused of living far from reality, off in a delusional fantasy world. I have never understood this divide, because it misses the entire point of picking up a book: to read is to learn. Not always about the world outside, but often about the world within. Understanding oneself has to come first, before we can venture into the greater knowledge of the world outside.
I say this from experience. Reading, for me, has always made my mind louder than my words, it’s where the parts of me that don’t get spoken out loud find room to exist. Fiction, especially, paves a way into worlds I can’t imagine, not just fantasy, but the quiet possibility of untold stories and unlived lives, the sense that there are a thousand versions of being human I will never live but can still understand through my books. History does something different: it lays bare the patterns, how civilisations rise on the same instincts, fall for the same mistakes, and repeat themselves in new costumes across centuries. And geopolitics has been its own kind of education that has sharpened how I see the world as it is actually shifting, not how it’s assumed to be. Between the three, I’ve found that reading doesn’t just enlighten, it expands the lens I see everything else through.
This, I think, is the real value of reading in a world like ours, oversaturated, overstimulated, and starving for depth without realizing it. Reading slows us down long enough to think instead of react. It builds the kind of attention span our habits are quietly eroding. Socrates once said, “know thyself,” and I’ve come to believe that reading, quiet and unassuming as it is, might be one of the most honest ways to do exactly that. Bacon called knowledge power. I’d add that self-knowledge, the kind fiction, history, and even the news can hand you if you let it, is its own kind of power too.
So this habit, once so precious that common people were denied it and now sits neglected on our shelves, how do we bring it back? I don’t think the answer is a grand one. It starts small: fifteen minutes set aside, away from a screen, just to sit with an idea long enough to let it finish forming. It looks like book clubs and reading circles that turn a solitary habit into a shared one. It looks like walking into a local bookstore instead of scrolling past one more recommendation online. And for those of us with children or younger siblings watching, it looks like simply being seen with a book in hand, because a home with visible, well-worn pages raises a more curious mind than any school lecture ever could.
Reading was once forbidden because it gave people the power to think for themselves. Nothing forbids us today except our own distractions. Maybe it’s time we picked it back up, unapologetically for what we choose to read and without rushing to finish it. A book takes you through a journey, an adventure, and knowledge that becomes your superpower. Why live one life when you can experience multiple through books.