there was a time when books were scarce, literacy was a privilege, and education was reserved for the few. access to knowledge was something people fought for.
today, we carry entire libraries in our pockets. with a few taps, we can access more books, research, and more ideas than any generation before us could have imagined. yet somehow we find ourselves reading less than ever before in history.
Books are no longer out of reach. Our attention is.
the obstacle is no longer access - it's our attention span. every app we use competes everyday for our attention with notifications permissions, short videos, infinite scrolling, autoplay, personalised algorithms and social validation. our attention has become a commodity, traded by platforms engineered and made to capture it, but more often than not, never to actually enrich it.
reading asks something entirely different. it asks us to slow down, and to sit with one idea long enough for it to make and impact on us.
perhaps that's why reading feels like a status symbol today. not because books have become more valuable, but because constant and sustained attention has become rare. finishing a book now signals more than just literacy - it signals presence of mind.
maybe the greatest irony of our time is this: after centuries spent fighting to make knowledge accessible, we no longer struggle to acess the books - we struggle to give them our attention