What happens when we optimize everything for people who no longer have the patience to read? And what if some of us helped build the world that made them that way?
“Janelle?”
At the sound of my name, I closed the book I was reading and looked up.
It was Anna, my esthetician, coming to retrieve me for my usual chemical peel. As we walked toward the treatment room, she asked about the book I’d been reading. Then she said something that caught me off guard: how wonderful it was to see someone sitting there reading an actual physical book instead of looking at their phone.
I was genuinely surprised by her comment.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been.
I really hadn’t given it much thought. As someone in my early 40s, I grew up surrounded by books. As the daughter of a Montessori teacher, I learned to read by the age of three and had perfected cursive handwriting before I was seven years old. I was also a regular fixture at my local library during the summer reading program throughout elementary school.
But looking back, it wasn’t just books. Reading and writing seemed to be embedded in nearly everything I loved.
I kept a diary. I wrote poetry. I wanted to be a journalist when I grew up. I obsessed over music—usually staying within lunging distance of my radio, pen and paper at the ready, a blank cassette tape already inserted in case a favorite song came on. Later, I’d painstakingly transcribe the song lyrics, stopping and rewinding the tape over and over until I got every word.
With friends, I penned songs of my own and even formed a middle school-aged, albeit short-lived, rock band called “The Losairs”—a play on, as well as reclamation of, the word “losers.” I spent hours thumbing through piano sheet music at Sam Goody’s and saved enough cash to buy the latest music so I could take it home and practice on the piano.
Words were everywhere.
They were also part of my bedtime ritual.
My childhood was flooded with countless nights spent staying up late, reading by flashlight—waiting until I was sure my parents were in bed, stuffing an extra pillow under my door so the light wouldn’t escape, pulling a book from beneath my pillow and disappearing under the covers, flashlight carefully balanced beside me.
Pages turning late into the night.
And then there were the notes.
Often, I’d sit at my desk writing handwritten notes to friends, fingers working deftly—folding and tucking corners—until a sheet of notebook paper became its own little piece of origami, ready to be passed the next day – on the bus, in class, in the hallway or slipped into a friend’s locker. That organic exchange of written words continued well into high school, right up until graduation.
None of this felt particularly remarkable at the time. It was simply how we communicated, entertained ourselves and made sense of the world.
And now, apparently, sitting in a waiting room reading a book had become noteworthy.
Like one of those highlight reels you see at the end of someone’s life in a movie, all of this played through my head after that brief exchange with Anna.
I smiled. We chatted. My face burned under the chemical peel as I lay there.
But Anna’s comment stayed with me.
Because lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about reading.
The readers are disappearing
A few weeks earlier, I’d read Rose Horowitch’s cover story in the August 2026 issue of The Atlantic, “The Age of Reading is Over.“
It’s not a particularly comforting read.
Horowitch examines the possibility that we’re moving toward what she calls a postliterate society—not one in which people are technically unable to read, but one in which fewer people possess either the inclination or the attention required to read deeply.
The distinction matters.
We are surrounded by words. We read text messages and emails and captions and headlines and Teams messages and Reddit threads. We encounter written language nearly everywhere we turn.
But encountering words isn’t necessarily the same thing as reading.
Deep reading requires something increasingly scarce: sustained attention.
It asks us to remain with an idea after it stops immediately rewarding us. To tolerate confusion. To follow someone else’s argument long enough to understand it before deciding whether we agree with it. To hold information in our minds and connect it with something we encountered ten pages—or ten years—ago.
Reading is slow.
The Internet is not.
And increasingly, neither are we.
Horowitch’s article bothered me in part because I recognized myself in it.
As I lay on the treatment table with my 20-something year-old esthetician remarking on the novelty of my book, I found myself wondering:
Am I a fraud?
Because for all my nostalgia about flashlights and libraries and handwritten notes, my adult life has been spent in a VERY different world.
My career, more or less, for the past 18 years has been in digital content and marketing—specifically search engine optimization (SEO), and more recently, AI optimization (AIO).
I have quite literally built a career around understanding how people behave on the Internet.
And [spoiler alert] people on the Internet are impatient.
I know exactly why you’re skimming this.
Like most Xennials, I straddle two worlds.
I was part of what was arguably the last generation to have a childhood before social media. But I was young enough to embrace the Internet almost from the beginning. I distinctly remember when “the Internet” became a thing. My family was among the first of my friends’ families to have it in our house.
AOL was the shit.
God help you if you happened to be in the middle of an intense AIM conversation when someone picked up the phone.
We were on borrowed time. Literally.
You had a finite amount of time you could be “online.” Back then, most of our knowledge as kids came from our parents, teachers, coaches, and whatever other adults happened to be around us.
I remember being at a sleepover at my friend Katie’s house. Her mom was young and fresh out of her divorce and was, to us fifth-graders, impossibly cool. We sat around the backyard cross-legged, snacking on junk food after having tinkered around with hair and makeup, peppering this poor woman with questions anything and everything related to growing up.
- What’s it like to be in love?
- Why do guys act like jerks?
- What is it like to get your period?
If we wanted to know something, we asked someone.
Or we looked it up.
In a book.
Fast-forward three decades and, to put my career in comically reductive terms, I now make a living helping information find people as efficiently as possible.
For years, my job in SEO has involved taking editorial content and making sure it reads well, makes sense and can actually be found by the people searching for it.
But there’s another consideration that anyone working in digital content understands:
People don’t read websites. They scan them.
So we accommodate them.
- Short paragraphs.
- Descriptive headers.
- Bulleted lists.
- Important information near the top.
- Clear language.
- Easy navigation.
- No unnecessary friction.
We break walls of text into digestible pieces because we know attention is limited.
We obsess over user experience.
We optimize.
And optimize.
And optimize.
Until one day you look around and realize we may have optimized ourselves into an inability to tolerate anything that hasn’t been optimized for us.
Forty-seven seconds
Horowitch’s article cites research suggesting that our attention to a single screen has fallen dramatically over the past two decades—to an average of just 47 seconds.
This is something I understand professionally. A good chunk of my job requires taking editorial content and making sure it works for an audience whose attention is increasingly difficult to hold.
I’ve tried to keep pace with the rapidly evolving digital landscape. I’ve collected more AI certifications than Thanos has collected Infinity Stones. I’ve learned new platforms and algorithms and acronyms. SEO. AIO. GEO. LLM. SEM. AEO. And whatever the hell comes next.
I’ve adapted because that’s what people working in digital media do.
Meanwhile, I’ve watched my own reading habits ebb and flow.
I still read. I’ve always considered myself a reader.
But I also know what it feels like to reach for my phone reflexively. To read three pages of a book and realize my mind wandered aimlessly through two of them. To feel the bizarre impulse to check something when absolutely nothing needs checking.
I know how quickly a quiet moment gets filled now.
Standing in line.
Waiting for an appointment.
Sitting in the car before going inside.
Ten seconds of boredom and the phone comes out.
Which is probably why Anna noticed my book.
Twenty years ago, reading in a waiting room would’ve been unremarkable.
Today, it apparently makes you an outlier.
And then there’s my daughter
If my own declining attention makes me uneasy, watching my daughter enter school makes the question harder to dismiss.
She starts kindergarten this week.
Among the items on her school-supply list: headphones.
Not Bluetooth headphones mind you. A “pair of headphones with cord.”
Because every kindergartener will be issued an iPad for “educational use” during the school day.
When I toured our local elementary schools last summer, I asked one of the principals whether there was still a computer class. I remember computer labs being a distinct part of school: a room full of desktop computers where we learned typing and basic technology skills.
The principal looked at me for a long moment.
Not rudely. More like I had just asked where they kept the overhead projectors.
There wasn’t really a “computer class” anymore, she explained, because technology had been incorporated into the curriculum itself.
Of course it had.
The computers didn’t disappear.
They became ubiquitous.
The technology isn’t in one room anymore.
It’s everywhere.
And I’m not inherently opposed to that. Digital literacy matters. My daughter’s generation will need technological fluency in ways mine never did.
But I can’t shake the question of what happens when the tool becomes the environment.
Her school does teach handwriting. Her kindergarten class will practice proper pencil grip and letter formation. But cursive isn’t part of the standard curriculum. In some schools, it survives only as an elective or enrichment activity.
These are small things.
An iPad.
A pair of headphones.
A handwriting lesson.
A child growing up knowing how to to swipe while she’s still learning what it means to disappear into a book.
None of them individually represents the end of civilization.
But taken together, they make me wonder what we’re training the next generation’s brains to expect.
And what we’re failing to train them to endure.
Boredom.
Difficulty.
Silence.
Confusion.
Waiting.
The slow accumulation of understanding.
Maybe efficiency isn’t always the goal
This is where my professional world and my personal one begin to collide.
Digital technology has done extraordinary things for access to information. Search engines put entire libraries at our fingertips. AI can explain an unfamiliar concept in seconds, translate languages, summarize enormous documents and help someone begin to learn virtually anything.
I use these tools.
I work with these tools.
I believe in their usefulness.
But increasingly, I wonder whether our obsession with making information easier to consume has caused us to confuse accessing information with understanding it.
They aren’t the same thing.
A summary can tell you what someone argued.
It cannot do the intellectual work of following the argument yourself.
AI can give you an answer.
It cannot make you wrestle with the question.
A search engine can take you directly to the paragraph you need.
It cannot give you the accidental discovery you might’ve found in the 40 pages you skipped.
Efficiency is valuable when efficiency is the goal.
But maybe some things aren’t supposed to be efficient.
Maybe reading is one of them.
Maybe thinking is, too.
My God. Am I part of the problem?
That’s the uncomfortable question I keep returning to.
My professional life has rewarded me for understanding exactly how impatient we’ve become.
Make it shorter.
Make it scannable.
Put the answer first.
Remove friction.
Give people what they’re looking for as quickly as possible.
And now AI promises to remove even more of that friction.
- Why search through ten results when a machine can synthesize them for you?
- Why read a 2,000-word article when you can ask for five bullet points?
- Why struggle through a difficult explanation when you can ask a chatbot to make it simpler?
There is enormous value in all of that.
There is also a cost.
The danger isn’t that technology makes us stupid.
It’s that technology becomes so good at doing our intellectual work for us that we gradually stop noticing which muscles we aren’t using anymore.
Reading is one of those muscles.
Writing is another.
Attention may be the most important one of all.
And I don’t have an easy solution.
I’m certainly not giving up my phone. I’m not abandoning AI or pretending the Internet hasn’t dramatically improved my life. I’m not going to demand that my daughter learn exclusively from chalkboards and encyclopedias while the rest of her generation moves forward without her.
That’s not the world we live in.
But I do think I want to start treating attention as something worth protecting.
For myself, that might mean reaching for the book instead of my phone when I have 20 minutes to kill.
For my daughter, it might mean making sure that alongside the iPad and its corded headphones there are library trips, bedtime stories, pencils, paper, and books that occasionally require her to work a little harder than she’d like.
It might even mean letting her be bored.
It might mean resisting the urge to optimize every moment of her life.
Because perhaps the thing I’m most afraid of losing isn’t literacy itself.
I don’t think books are going to disappear. Words certainly aren’t. If anything, we are drowning in them.
What worries me is losing our willingness to stay with them.
To sit quietly with an idea.
To follow it somewhere.
To struggle.
To wonder.
To change our minds.
To turn the page.
Maybe Anna was right to notice the book in my hands that afternoon.
I just wish it hadn’t been remarkable.