What happened to reading? What happened to getting into bed late at night with a book and not wanting to sleep because you are in the middle of a good chapter but every chapter is a good chapter so once you finish the good chapter you still aren’t ready to sleep because there are so many more and your parents come into your room and it’s 11 but you are in third grade and your bedtime is 8:30 so you wait for them to sleep then you pull out the super cool pen you have that has a flashlight at the end of it then you read until you fall asleep with the book in your lap and when you wake up in the morning the light is still on and you have lost your page so you quickly search for it as you rub the sleep out of your eyes and hurry up to get dressed so you can read on the couch? Just me? Oddly specific anecdote aside, it has been so long since I have been able to get together with someone and talk about a book in depth. Not a school book, but a book we have both read in our spare time just because we felt like it. Any discussions now are about books we read when we were younger, desperately holding onto plot points that we have long since forgotten, throwing out names that might have been in the story and hope that the other person understands us. They usually don’t. No one reads books for fun anymore. And yes we can blame school worl, and yes we can blame our social lives, and yes we can just say sleep is more important, but, at risk of sounding like an oldie, let’s assign blame to social media. I love reading. School books, not so much, but get me a book about magic and faeries and dragons, add in a war and a love story and I am pretty much hooked. But it has been so long since I sat down and read. It had been too long since I’ve stayed up late trying to speed through one last chapter, then having to reread it in the morning because I missed too much. Now I stay up late on my phone scrolling through social media, too tired to laugh at what I see. After a night on my phone I wake up tired and dreading school, but after a night of reading, I am still exhausted but satisfied. I used to remember my dreams and would have some pretty cool ones. But now, even once I am off my phone it takes me while to fall asleep, and wake up with no recollection of what I thought off as a slept. Phones and social media aren’t the devil, people just don’t know how to balance them, something we all need to work on. Every once in a while, try reading a book. Find a book you like and it really won’t be a chore, but an aDvEnTuRe.
Reading this made me sad because I never really thought about how I never read for fun anymore when it used to be my #1 pastime. And I definitely agree that social media and our phones is the main reason for the lack of reading. I turn straight to Instagram for entertainment and find myself wasting hours and hours on it instead of doing something productive. The thought of reading a book is so daunting to me now because I'm used to getting entertainment in a quicker, easier way that lets me shut my brain off.
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