For the love of God, pick up a fucking book.

For the Love of God, 

Pick Up a Fucking Book

ANTHONY S. IRWIN 

When I finished school, I could have sworn I was done writing essays. That felt like one of the few clear benefits of adulthood. No homework. No assigned reading. No sitting at a kitchen table at eleven at night trying to turn four hundred words into a  thousand by describing the same tree three different ways. Yet here I am, thirty four years old, voluntarily writing an essay because I have developed a loud opinion literally no one asked to hear. I do not always have the mental capacity to work on a novel, but apparently I have enough left in the tank to complain about civilization for several thousand words. I figure that is better than nothing. It feels like the world is burning, and every time I open my phone I am handed a different angle of the fire. 

One minute it’s some prick from the Manosphere telling me how much a man should spend on a first date, because apparently the fate of Western civilization rests on whether she orders the calamari. The next minute it is a thirty second clip from a Braves game in the early 2000s, which I will watch in its entirety because Chipper Jones still deserves my respect. Then I am taking in the great cultural debates of our time by watching Joe Budden yell at his cohosts about whether it is pronounced oxtail or oxtails. Socrates had the agora. We have Patreon.

Then it’s a group of teenagers terrorizing a supermarket for TikTok, knocking shit over, throwing things at strangers and calling the inevitable violence a prank. Somewhere else, a live streamer is outside a nightclub sexually harassing women in the name of content while thousands of people watch, donate money and type laughing emojis. Meanwhile, the ocean is filling with plastic, animals are eating it, and scientists keep finding pieces of it in places where plastic has absolutely no business being. Data centers are drinking enormous amounts of clean water and making some strange humming sound that the people living nearby swear is driving them insane. Flock cameras are watching every car that passes through town. Every app knows where I am, what I bought and how long I paused over a photograph of a sandwich. At this rate, the collapse of civilization will arrive through some combination of poisoned water, surveillance cameras and a low electrical hum nobody can locate. 

But when I am in my house, my book is not secretly recording me. It does not know where I went that afternoon. It does not ask for access to my contacts. It has never sent my location to a company I have never heard of. It just sits there, quietly, like an object from a more trusting civilization. 

But I digress. The ocean, surveillance cameras and the mysterious hum of modernity may have to wait for another essay. God help us all when I decide to write that one. 

“For the love of God, pick up a fucking book.” 

It is a phrase I find myself saying to friends and coworkers in a lighthearted way whenever we are discussing just about anything. Politics, relationships, history, human behavior, why the world is the way it is. Sometimes it is a recommendation. Sometimes it is an insult disguised as helpful advice. Most of the time, it is both. It always gets a laugh, which is how I intend it. But lately, I have started to wonder whether I am joking at all. Would John Steinbeck have written East of Eden if he had TikTok in his pocket distracting him all day? We do not know. Steinbeck has been dead for nearly fifty eight years and is therefore unavailable for comment. I was going to say he has been worm food for nearly fifty eight years, with all due respect, but apparently he was cremated. This is precisely why people should pick up a fucking book. 

Maybe Steinbeck would have possessed the discipline to put the phone down. Maybe he would have spent six hours watching videos about an argument between strangers he would never meet. Maybe Cathy Ames would have ended up as a four part true crime series narrated by a woman doing her makeup. We will never know. What we do know is that East of Eden required years of sustained thought, while nearly everything surrounding us is now designed to interrupt thought before it becomes inconvenient. Would Albert Camus have written The Stranger if he had spent all day on Twitter arguing with strangers? Maybe. He might have created an account called NocapCamu, put “absurdist” in his bio and spent six hours arguing with an anime wolf about whether life has meaning. Which, to be fair, still might have produced The Stranger. It just would have been a thread, and half the replies would have been people correcting his grammar. 

And that is the question I cannot shake. It is not only what we have stopped reading. It is what may never be created. How many books are not being written? How many paintings are not being painted? How many songs are never finished because the mind capable of making them is interrupted every thirty seconds? Art needs stretches of boredom, silence and sustained thought. Phones have hijacked those spaces, and maybe some of the minds along with them. The loss is impossible to measure because the missing work never exists. There is no empty shelf labeled The Novel Someone Almost Wrote Before Opening TikTok. Somewhere, the person who might have written the next great American novel is watching a stranger reorganize a refrigerator at two in the morning. 

I am aware of how this sounds. I am thirty four years old, complaining about young people, new technology and the decline of civilization. All I need is a folding chair, a garden hose and a reason to call the police on someone with a E-Bike. I can hear myself aging in real time. Every generation believes the one after it is stupid, lazy and listening to music that barely qualifies as music. People once believed novels themselves would corrupt the minds of the young. Socrates complained that writing would weaken human memory. Somewhere in ancient Greece, an older man was probably furious that teenagers no longer stared thoughtfully at goats. I own a smartphone. I scroll when I’m bored. I have lost hours of my life watching arguments between people I have never met over subjects neither of them understands. I am not standing outside this problem looking down at everybody else. I am waist deep in it, holding my phone above the water. 

So yes, I understand the danger of confusing personal irritation with social analysis. I understand that reading a book does not automatically make someone intelligent. Plenty of idiots own books. Some of them have written books (Me) I have probably met smarter people on bar stools than in certain bookstores. I am also not opposed to convenience. I own an air fryer. I love that thing. If civilization falls, I will spend my final moments reheating chicken tenders at four hundred degrees for eight minutes. But I do think we have confused convenience with progress. We have made almost everything faster, easier and more immediately available without asking what those improvements might be training us to become. We have designed a world that removes waiting, boredom, friction and silence, then acted confused when people lose the ability to wait, tolerate boredom, overcome friction or sit silently with themselves. 

That is the larger idea I keep circling. This is not really an essay about books. It is about attention, patience, loneliness and what happens when a society begins treating everything as disposable. Objects. Information. Art. Other people. Even our own thoughts, abandoned the moment something brighter appears on the screen. The decline in reading is not imaginary. In 2003, roughly twenty eight percent of Americans read for pleasure on an average day. By 2023, that number had fallen to about sixteen percent. Among high school seniors, the collapse is even more dramatic. In the late 1970s, around sixty percent said they read a book, newspaper or magazine every day for pleasure. By 2016, only sixteen percent did. In 2025, the average American over fifteen spent about sixteen minutes a day reading for personal interest and more than two and a half hours watching television. Sixteen minutes is barely enough time to find the book, remember where you left off and realize you have been reading the same paragraph while thinking about whether you locked the car. 

And here is the part that makes the whole thing especially ridiculous. Film studios and streaming services appear terrified of making anything original, so they keep adapting books. The same people who refuse to read for forty minutes will watch eight straight hours of a television show based on a novel and then complain that they have to wait until next year for another season. We have somehow reached a point where books are considered too demanding to consume but remain essential as raw material for nearly everything we do consume. Apparently even television knows that readers already did the hard part. 

I was going to provide precise statistics about how often children use social media, but honestly, look around. The little bastards are on it all day. They are on it before school, during school, after school and probably during whatever moments used to be reserved for looking out a car window and developing an imagination. I have seen children navigate a phone with the speed and confidence of a military drone operator, then stare helplessly at a can opener. 

This is usually where a person tells me I am standing on a soapbox. Fine. Maybe I am. Maybe this is just an aging man yelling at a cloud, except the cloud now stores everyone’s photographs, location history and credit card information.  But this is no longer merely about whether people have the attention span for East of Eden. Children are killing themselves more. Between 2001 and 2021, the suicide rate among American girls between ten and fourteen nearly quadrupled. Among high school girls, the percentage who seriously considered attempting suicide rose from about nineteen percent in 2011 to thirty percent in 2021. The number improved slightly by 2023, but it remained horrifyingly high. During roughly the same period, social media worked its way into nearly every pocket, bedroom and unguarded hour of their lives. I cannot honestly say that Instagram caused every one of those deaths. The evidence does not allow me to say that, and pretending otherwise would weaken the argument. Suicide is complicated. Mental illness is complicated. Families, schools, poverty, abuse, isolation and countless other forces matter.

But the evidence does allow us to say that frequent social media use is associated with bullying, hopelessness, suicidal thoughts and suicide planning, and that girls appear especially vulnerable. Nearly half of teenagers say social media makes them feel worse about their bodies. We handed children a machine that follows them home from school, shows them impossible beauty standards, quantifies their popularity and gives their bullies twenty four hour access to them. Then we acted surprised when some of them began to break. 

That is the point where this stops being a harmless complaint about teenagers dancing on TikTok. This is not just me on a soapbox. Children are looking at altered faces and impossible bodies all day, comparing their unfinished lives with carefully edited performances and learning that every private insecurity can become public entertainment. The cruelty that once ended when the school bell rang can now follow them into bed. 

Young women are not the only ones disappearing into this machinery. Young men are disappearing too, although it often looks different. During 2013 and 2015, when I was roughly twenty two years old, only nine percent of men between twenty two and thirty four reported going an entire year without sex. Less than a decade later, that number had climbed to twenty four percent. I find this difficult to comprehend. When I was twenty two, sex was just about the only thing I was doing. I was not reading as much as I should have been either, but at least I was leaving the house. 

The sex itself is not really the point. Nobody is owed sex, and having more of it does not automatically mean someone is living a meaningful life. But sex does tend to require meeting another human being, earning a degree of trust and remaining interesting for longer than eight seconds. Its disappearance is one piece of a much larger retreat. Men are dating less, socializing less and maintaining fewer close friendships.

In 1990, three percent of American men said they had no close friends. By 2021, that number had climbed to fifteen percent. Over the same period, the share of men who said they had at least six close friends fell from fifty five percent to twenty seven percent. We gave lonely young men access to the entire world, and a growing number of them stopped going out into it. 

None of these problems is exactly the same. A teenage girl being bullied online is not the same as a lonely man spending every night alone. Reading less is not the same as having less sex. Plastic in the ocean is not the same as a phone addiction. I am not trying to stuff every modern problem into one enormous canvas bag labeled “technology” and then beat it with a hardcover copy of The Grapes of Wrath. But they do seem connected by a culture of consumption without attachment. We consume images without remembering them, opinions without examining them, products without repairing them and people without truly knowing them. Everything arrives instantly and almost nothing is built to remain. We swipe past faces, throw away objects and move on from ideas before they have had time to disturb us. 

Plastic may be the perfect physical symbol of this arrangement. It is cheap, convenient and designed to be used briefly, but it remains long after we have forgotten it. The feed works in the opposite way. Its contents disappear immediately, but the habits it creates remain. One leaves garbage in the ocean. The other leaves noise in the mind. Both are products of a society that became very good at producing things and very bad at asking where they go afterward. 

At this point, part of me feels like the Unabomber warning everyone about technology, which is not where I expected an essay about reading to take me. To be absolutely clear, Ted Kaczynski murdered three people and injured twenty three more. What he did was evil, and “he made some interesting points” is not a defense for mailing bombs to strangers. But here is the profoundly inconvenient part. The murderous hermit occasionally had a point. He understood that technology does not simply give us new tools. It reorganizes society around those tools and then forces human beings to adapt to them. It promises freedom while making us dependent, connection while weakening communities and convenience while quietly reducing our autonomy. He identified something real and responded to it monstrously. So no, I am not endorsing the Unabomber. I would simply like to register a few concerns about technology without accidentally starting a fan club for a domestic terrorist. 

I would love to end this with a ten point plan for repairing human attention, ending loneliness, saving the ocean and teaching people that strangers on the internet do not get to decide whether they are beautiful. I do not have that plan. I apply ceramic coatings to cars for a living. If civilization is waiting for me to produce its blueprint for survival, then we are already in considerably deeper trouble than this essay has suggested. 

I do not know how to make billions of people want less convenience. I do not know how to persuade technology companies to stop monetizing human weakness when monetizing human weakness has made some of them richer than entire countries. I do not know how to convince people that boredom is not a medical emergency or that every silent moment does not need to be filled by watching a stranger explain which breakfast cereal represents each sign of the zodiac. I am not even certain that all of this can be reversed. 

I am also not suggesting that we destroy every smartphone, shut down the internet and return to some imaginary golden age when everyone read Dostoevsky by candlelight and treated one another beautifully. That period did not exist. People were ignorant, lonely, cruel and distracted long before anyone could blame an algorithm. Technology has made genuinely wonderful things possible. It allows families separated by oceans to see one another’s faces. It gives isolated people access to communities they might never find where they live. It has placed more human knowledge within reach of an ordinary person than the largest libraries in history could hold. 

I can carry Steinbeck, Camus and nearly every song ever recorded in the same device I use to check the weather.

The problem is that I usually check the weather and somehow end up watching a man in Florida fight an alligator in a convenience store parking lot.  That is the part I cannot resolve with a neat answer. The same device can teach a child another language or convince her that her face is inadequate. It can help a lonely man find a community or give him somewhere to disappear from the world completely. It can preserve a friendship across thousands of miles or quietly replace every friendship within walking distance. These things are not purely good or purely evil. They are tools designed by people, but increasingly those tools are designed to hold our attention for as long as possible because our attention has become the product being sold. Personal discipline matters, but there is something dishonest about placing the entire burden on individuals while some of the most powerful companies on Earth employ armies of intelligent people to make self control more difficult. 

There are larger responsibilities here. Parents should not have to fight these systems alone. Schools should teach children how algorithms shape what they see before those algorithms begin shaping how they see themselves. Technology companies should be forced to demonstrate that products marketed to children are safe for children. We should create more spaces where young people can exist without being expected to purchase something, post something or build a personal brand before they have finished becoming people. 

Libraries, parks, sports teams, community centers and ordinary places to gather are not nostalgic luxuries. They are part of the physical infrastructure of human connection. I do not know precisely which regulations would work, where every age restriction should fall or how to prevent every unintended consequence. Anyone claiming to have a perfect answer is probably about to sell you an app. 

But not having every answer is different from having no responsibility. There are things I know, even if they are smaller than the scale of the problem. I know the solution will not arrive as another notification. I know that a conversation feels different when neither person has a phone sitting on the table like a third participant waiting to interrupt. I know that loneliness cannot be solved entirely through an interface, that confidence cannot be built entirely from the approval of strangers and that a person cannot develop an inner life if every empty moment is immediately invaded by somebody else’s voice. I know there is value in being bored long enough for your own thoughts to become audible. 

Maybe the beginning is embarrassingly ordinary. Put the phone in another room. Read something longer than a caption. Call someone instead of liking their photo. Sit across from another human being and survive the occasional silence. Go somewhere without announcing that you are there. Buy fewer things designed to become garbage. Repair something. Make something badly before learning to make it well. Allow an experience to belong only to you instead of immediately turning it into content for people you barely know. None of this is revolutionary. That may be why none of it is particularly marketable. 

The difference between doom scrolling for an hour and reading for an hour does not look dramatic on a random Tuesday night. In both cases, you are sitting on the couch in sweatpants staring at something while avoiding the laundry. One person learns why a celebrity they do not follow has been forced to apologize. The other gets forty pages into a novel. Nobody receives a medal. 

But do it every day for a year and that hour becomes 365 hours, more than fifteen full days. At a steady forty pages an hour, that is 14,600 pages, or about thirty six books of four hundred pages each. Over ten years, it becomes 3,650 hours, more than 152 complete days. 

One habit leaves you with thousands of disconnected fragments selected to keep you agitated. The other leaves you with stories, ideas, language, history and time spent inside minds beyond your own. Not every book will make you wiser, and not every video is garbage. I understand that reading The Da Vinci Code does not automatically transform someone into Marcus Aurelius. But choices this small stop being small when repeated. Eventually, they become a life. 

And pick up a book. Not because every book contains wisdom, because plenty of books are terrible, and not because holding one automatically makes anyone intelligent. Pick one up because reading is an act of sustained attention in a culture organized around interruption. A book does not flash, vibrate or become jealous when you look away. It does not count your engagement, compare you with other readers or alert everyone you went to high school with that you have reached Chapter Twelve. It simply waits. 

It requires you to slow down, remain with another person’s thoughts and participate in creating meaning from them. For a little while, it asks you to stop consuming fragments and experience something whole. And while you are reading it, nobody is measuring how long you looked at Chapter Seven so they can sell you a slightly different Chapter Seven tomorrow. 

Maybe that will not save us. Maybe the ocean will continue filling with plastic, the cameras will continue multiplying and younger generations will discover entirely new ways to avoid speaking to one another. I do not have a solution large enough to guarantee otherwise. I cannot put out every fire, and neither can a book. 

But every culture is built from repeated habits, and so is every person. If our habits helped create this world, changing them is at least a place to begin. 

I do not have all the answers. I am not entirely sure I understand all the questions.

But for the love of God, pick up a fucking book.