The Lost Art Of Reading Fiction

3 Reasons What Went Wrong

Photo by Eliott Reyna on Unsplash

One of the best things that can happen to you in a genuine, loyal and deep friendship is having conversations that crack open your head.

I had such a conversation with my friend over coffee around mid-February, and it has still stuck with me.

I am calling this conversation The Lost Art Of Reading Fiction.

Ours is a friendship built on our love for novels and reading, so conversing about it was unsurprising. What surprised and saddened us both is how we have drifted away from enjoying this hobby of ours. So we continued our conversation to figure out what went wrong. We found three reasons so far -

1. 20s: The Age Of Recalibration

The first 21 years of our lives, that is, until graduation, we live in a relatively safe and stable bubble. We don't have any direct responsibilities of the world, so we don't feel any direct consequences. But that doesn't remain the case when we keep our graduation cap and gown aside and step out of this bubble.

That is when we realise what we have learnt in the 21 years of life needs recalibrating.

The lessons taught in school are outdated and can't be applied to real life. No one ever taught us how to manage the stresses of adulthood. Our sense of self, with regard to ourselves and others, is distorted. We are made to sit in front of our computers, day in, day out, and work hard as donkeys. And then we are not respected and rewarded for our efforts, either in cash or in kind. Relationships become complicated. Friendships are hard to make. And the ones from childhood drift away because they, too, are busy understanding what it means to be a human in society. Childhood traumas come back to visit us in the hopes of healing. And with all that, we also have the pressure of finding a partner, getting married, starting a family, and maintaining a job.

In short, by the end of the day, we are physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually exhausted to make time to read novels.

2. Self-Help And Fallacy

As a result of the above point, we realise we don't entirely know who we are and what we want. That is when Self-Help content steps in. That is where we spend most of our time in our 20s instead of reading novels.

Do you need help with taking care of your health? There are hundreds of self-help books, videos, and courses to help you.

Do you need help with healing your traumas? There are hundreds of self-help books, videos, and courses to help you.

Do you need help in finding community and companionship? There are hundreds of self-help books, videos, and courses to help you.

Do you need help with finding who you are? There are hundreds of self-help books, videos, and courses to help you.

And, to some extent, they do help you. But then comes a point where this help is bringing us diminishing returns.

My friend and I found two such points -

One, self-help content becomes repetitive.

The same points or habits, or suggestions are repeated everywhere. And not just among different self-help content creators, but some creators keep repeating their points. Initially, their content may have attracted and helped us, but the redundancy made us leave them. The content creators who repeat themselves are trying to attract only the people who just found them but not keep the relationship with existing fans/followers going and growing.

Two, self-help content becomes sabotaging.

Instead of helping us become better versions of ourselves, most self-help contents contribute to lowering our self-worth. Instead of giving hope, most of such content tells us what's wrong with us or how wrong we are.

The only examples my friend and I could think of where self-help content was helpful and hopeful are - Atomic Habits by James Clear, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel, The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, and The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale.

When it comes to learning lessons about life, my friend said an excellent point - that is, we learnt more life lessons from novels than from self-help books. Somehow, learning valuable lessons in the form of a fiction story sticks and stays with us deeper than reading or watching non-fiction content.

3. The Boom And Doom Of Social Media

My friend and I are 90s kids. So we were the guinea pigs for social media.

Now that we are older, we have learnt that social media is useful but mostly useless. It toots the horn of bringing us closer to the people worldwide, but does it actually? 10% maybe, fine 20%. But the majority of the things happening on social media have no direct usefulness. And social media has side effects, one of them being the reduction in focus, concentration and attention span.

As a dog gets trained with treats, we are trained with content. First, they made us scroll, giving us a dopamine hit as a reward. Just like the dog understands it'll get more treats if it does what its owner wants, we keep scrolling and get a continuous dopamine hit.

And just like eating chips, it's hard to stop at one.

How has then social media affected our fiction reading?

Firstly, social media scrolling has trained our brains to enjoy something new in as few as 30 seconds or even lesser. So now, when you sit to read a book and nothing happens within the first few sentences, it irritates us.

Second, thanks to social media, our attention span has been reduced to 30 seconds long. This means not only can we can't enjoy long reading sessions, we even have a hard time watching a 20-minute episode of a show. Either we reach out for the phone every few minutes, or stare at the book or show blankly and not process or enjoy anything.

You know you've read a good book when you turn the last page and feel a little as if you have lost a friend.
- Paul Sweeney

What We Miss About Reading Fiction?

My friend and I miss how novels were a relaxing break from our day-to-day life.
We miss how we always had a book on us, whether we read it or not.
We miss how the story and characters made us excited.
We miss how the story and characters made us have a good cry. And we cried not only for them but also relieved our pain and frustration.
We miss how these stories taught us lessons we didn't know we needed.
We miss how we experienced different worlds and lives from the comfort of our chairs.
We miss how the novels gave us hope that, in the end, all will be solved and well.

So How Can We Bring Back Novels Into Our Lives?

The choice is yours to make.

It's okay to understand yourself and be busy building a life. It's okay to get the help of self-help. It's okay to use social media. The question we need to ask ourselves is two-fold - Are we doing it too much? And is it helping me improve my life and/or enjoy it?

I assure you that adding a page or two of fiction reading in your day won't harm you. Instead, it would recharge you to face the day. And life.

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