If you missed last week’s post, here it is:
Next week, I start a 3-week series on Narcissistic Abuse. Don’t miss it.
A Pew Research survey from October 2025 found that 75% of US adults have read at least part of one book in the last 12 months. Eight percent read exactly one. Book clubs attract fewer people. Audiobooks and e-books are becoming widely used, while physical book readership is declining. More educated people, as well as more white people, read more books. People under 50 and Asians are more likely to use audiobooks and e-books. Women outread men. And about 25% of Americans just don’t read.
You might think, “Who cares? We’ve got YouTube and social media.” But reading seems to have a fascinating relationship with brain development, critical thinking, creativity, and more. Humans are the only species on the planet that have invented reading, and our brains have reorganized to do it. It’s got to be worth something to just give it up.
Some scientists argue that people who read more score higher on “Openness to new experiences” in the Big Five personality traits. In real life, that shows up as intellectual curiosity, an appetite for novelty, tolerance for complexity, imagination, and an interest in ideas.
It’s hard to say whether intellectually curious people got that way from reading books, or whether they read books because they are that way. It’s probably not worth trying to figure out which is the chicken and which is the egg. Education, childhood environment, vocabulary, parental modeling, income, and access to books also affect the probability of becoming a reader. In turn, reading compounds the initial differences.
Importantly, these readers may be getting a leg up over non-readers. Compare verbal knowledge between readers and non-readers, and you see, on average, a difference in eloquence, expression, and ability to convey not only information but also feelings and complex ideas. I found a meta-analysis on PubMed from 2024, claiming that “reading fiction led to significant small-sized cognitive benefits,” meaning lifetime fiction exposure correlated with better cognitive outcomes. It wasn’t remotely enough to say “readers are smarter,” but it is a meaningful population-level association that’s likely to increase as more people stop reading.
“…effects were greatest for verbal abilities, followed by general cognitive abilities and empathy/mentalizing/outgroup judgments. “
It’s not difficult to imagine how non-readers, losing the skill of reading, find reading more effortful, so they avoid it. But by avoiding reading, they also risk losing vocabulary and may find it difficult to express themselves and their ideas.
It reminds me of this British guy I watch on social media who says, “If you want to say ‘Don’t F*** with me,’ It is far too rude. Far too blunt…” and then goes on to give you alternatives, ending with the Victorian version. And as you can imagine, they are hilarious, but only because he’s got quite the vocabulary.
Beyond counting vocabulary, reading gives you repeated practice of inhabiting a mind that isn’t yours. I used to read a lot of Agatha Christie novels. Then moved to Raymond Chandler, and from there to more modern crime novels. When Breaking Bad came out, Season1, Episode 2, when Walter White and Jesse Pinkman had to dispose of the corpse of a rival drug dealer, I said, “Get hydrofluoric acid and put him in the bathtub. Make sure it’s NOT a ceramic tub or else…” Well, we know how that went. They put him in the regular ceramic tub, and the whole human-remains soup came crashing through the floorboards into the hallway below.
My boyfriend looked at me like, “How did you know that?” I told him that I know 100 ways to dispose of a body so no one can find it. I was just inhabiting the Breaking Bad world, but my boyfriend found it difficult to sleep at night for a while. Thankfully, most worlds I inhabit are much more pleasant and do not involve breaking the law. These days, I mostly read non-fiction and try to fill my head with more useful information.
Good reading, not just fiction, transforms the reader. It asks us to see different perspectives, and we inevitably ask ourselves many questions: “What would I do? What if I am in this situation? How can I use this? Is this helpful? What is left unsaid? What are the implications?” and so on. Our minds churn out ideas from there.
But, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s 2023 PIAAC assessment of adults ages 16–65, roughly 8% of working-age U.S. adults have extremely limited English literacy (below Level 1), while 28% have low literacy skills, meaning they struggle to comprehend as complexity increases. How does more than one quarter of the U.S population survive an increasingly complex world - from navigating bureaucracy to voting, to avoiding scams, to getting jobs, to simply functioning day-to-day?
Reading is literally a brain exercise. So is conversing, apparently.
Scientists analyzing 22 studies spanning 14 years found that we speak 338 fewer words per day in our modern societies. Meaning we don’t speak as much as we used to. Whether that means we’re also losing conversational skills is another question, but generally, skills we practice less aren’t skills we should expect to improve. “From 2005 to 2019, the reduction in the estimated number of words spoken per day was about 28%.“ It makes me wonder what COVID did to the rest.
That can’t be good.
Living in one’s own head hasn’t proven to be the most hospitable environment, especially for long periods. You see people talking to themselves and their pets instead, but that’s not helping with intellectual discourse or learning to live with other people’s opinions, preferences, ideas, and questions.
It’s not hard to imagine a feedback loop. People become uncomfortable asking for help or learning about their neighbors and community because these things require conversations. Face-to-face conversations become more uncomfortable, so people avoid them and feel increasingly isolated, but also more judgmental of others, more intolerant, and more vulnerable to confirmation bias and manipulation.
The not-talking bit is interesting in the age of AI because when people don’t know what to say, they just ask ChatGPT. The result is that people text like witty comedians or thoughtful, emotionally intelligent humans, but when you meet them in person, they can’t get three words out. “I hear what you’re saying, and I want to validate your feelings while also expressing my boundaries…” sounds terrific in a text. But in an actual argument, people interrupt, get defensive, can’t articulate what they feel, violate boundaries, or shut down.
Resumes shine, while people bomb their in-person job interviews. Someone writes beautifully reasoned emails but contributes very little when challenged in real time. When asked about their own email, if AI did much of the reasoning and probably all of the writing, they have difficulty defending their arguments or can’t remember what they wrote.
Not to mention what happens in classrooms these days. I used to sweat over papers and exams. Now, the answers are easy to get, but who bothers remembering them? AI can structure a paper, but students risk failing to develop the skill of structuring their thoughts. They lose the opportunity to think for themselves and to know why they think what they think.
Between not reading and not talking, we might be setting ourselves up for a very unpleasant future, one in which we find ourselves more polarized, more reliant on technology to do things for us, and more isolated. To circle back to the beginning, what would our world look like if it bifurcated into readers with conversational skills and mute non-readers?
Thanks for reading this.