A personal reflection while working on faisportleggiunlibro.it
Over the last few months, while working on the faisportleggiunlibro.it project, I found myself reflecting deeply on our relationship with reading. This wasn’t an abstract thought exercise, but something extremely personal: Why do I read less than I want to? Why do I find myself scrolling through my phone at the end of the day, even when I have a book I genuinely want to finish?
The answers, I discovered, are less individual than I thought. It isn't just a matter of willpower: it is a cultural, psychological, and technological current dragging us in a different direction. A current that the research I’ve been analyzing explains with surprising clarity.
Our Brains Have Been Rewired
When I think about why reading feels so effortless one moment and so exhausting the next, I realize the problem isn’t that my attention span is "broken." It works perfectly fine—but it works differently than it used to. The truth is, over the last decade, our brains have been literally retrained to respond to a new cognitive environment.
Mark Manson, in his video Why Nobody Can Read Anymore, uses a phrase that perfectly describes this phenomenon: multi-tracking. It isn't multi-tasking—which we already know is ineffective—but something more subtle: a rapid, continuous jump between a multitude of micro-stimuli. A WhatsApp thread, then a notification, then a Reel, then an email, then a headline, then a banner. None of these require true commitment: it takes a second to "consume" them and move on.
Our brains have learned this rhythm. They have been trained to seek high-frequency dopamine hits. The brain doesn’t want a story; it wants a spark. It doesn’t want a page; it wants an event. It doesn’t want a narrative; it wants a change of stimulus.
And this is where the conflict with deep reading begins.
A book demands the exact opposite of what we are mentally trained for today:
A singular focus,
For a prolonged period,
Without immediate rewards,
Without natural interruptions.
This makes reading, at least initially, almost painful. For a brain accustomed to "multi-tracking," staying inside a single idea for more than ten minutes feels unnatural. Reading becomes an act of slowness in a system built for speed. A slow movement inside an ecosystem that has taught us to constantly shift gears.
What we often interpret as "laziness," "lack of will," or "poor concentration" is actually a perfectly logical neurological adaptation: when a behavior is repeated thousands of times a day—scrolling, switching apps, jumping between content—it becomes our default cognitive mode.
That is why reading a book today feels difficult not just emotionally, but physically: our mind seeks the next stimulus even when there isn't one. It fidgets, it wanders, it gets distracted—not because it has forgotten how to focus, but because it has been trained to do the exact opposite.
In other words, reading isn't dead. It just finds itself living inside a brain that now dances to a different beat.
And that is where we must start.
We Are Paralyzed by Abundance
One of the most surprising paradoxes of our era is that the more books we have available, the less we read. This isn't symbolic: it is a proven psychological phenomenon known as the Paradox of Choice. When options become too numerous, our minds don't expand: they freeze.
In the past, when access to information was limited, our attention could afford to rest on a single piece of content for a long time. Today, we live in a completely different cognitive environment: we have millions of books, articles, podcasts, newsletters, and deep-dives at our fingertips. Information is potentially infinite, but our capacity to decide remains the same.
The result is twofold: decision paralysis first, dissatisfaction later. We are crushed by continuous optimization: we always want to choose "the perfect book," the most useful reading, the most relevant author. But as choices increase, the anxiety of making a mistake rises—and the likelihood of not choosing at all increases.
When options are overwhelming, choosing becomes surprisingly difficult. With books, this effect is amplified to the extreme. Today, we have access to millions of titles. Instead of facilitating us, this abundance creates a constant sensation of potential regret: every book we choose implies saying no to a thousand others. So, as soon as a novel slows down or an essay becomes challenging, an inner voice triggers: "Maybe there’s something better out there."
The result is a continuous cycle: we start, we abandon, we switch, we restart. We move through books like we are at an immense buffet, tasting everything but never actually sitting down to eat. Often, we end up not reading anything to the end. Not because of a lack of interest, but because abundance makes us restless, always on the verge of jumping to another possibility.
What happens is a sort of "cognitive grazing": we hop from text to text, tasting, skimming, grazing... but never digesting. Reading becomes an infinite buffet where it is easy to move around, but very difficult to actually sit at the table. In a system dominated by immediacy, any narrative pause looks like a defect. Any slowness looks like a waste of time.
In other words, abundance hasn't expanded our freedom: it has made it more fragile and unstable. It gave us everything, except the way to sit still long enough to actually enjoy it.
We Are Exhausted Before We Even Start
There is a simple and often unspoken reason why reading feels so hard: we reach the end of the day already mentally consumed. It isn't laziness, it isn't a lack of discipline—it is a real cognitive condition. Burnout is widespread today and has direct effects on our ability to concentrate: it drains working memory, reduces attention thresholds, and makes even following a linear thought exhausting. We live in a society where mental fatigue is no longer the exception: it has become the permanent background noise.
Modern work amplifies all of this. Cal Newport calls it the "Hyperactive Hive Mind": a system where we are constantly bombarded by micro-activities—emails, chats, notifications, meetings—that shatter our days into a mosaic of micro-focuses without ever granting true continuity. Every mental "ping," every context switch, erodes a bit of cognitive energy. Even when we close the computer, the mind doesn't shut down: "thirty invisible tabs" remain open, full of unresolved to-dos, unread messages, and suspended thoughts that burn mental RAM as if we were always on the verge of having to resume something.
The cognitive cost of this noise lies not just in the volume of work, but in how we work: shifting attention continuously is far more tiring than dedicating it to a single task. This is why a day full of micro-tasks leaves us more drained than an intense but focused day.
In this state, reading a book becomes an almost heroic act. Reading is an active activity; it requires participation, imagination, continuity. Conversely, a lit screen—a TV series, a short video, an infinite scroll—is a passive activity: it demands nothing, and offers immediate gratification. It is "mental junk food" that the exhausted brain naturally craves: fast, easy, effortless.
And when, despite everything, we try to read anyway, we enter a cycle of frustration: the tired mind doesn't retain information, we drift, we go back to reread the same paragraph, and we get irritated because "we can't focus." The act of reading becomes ineffective, and after a few attempts, we give in to the temptation of simpler content, reinforcing the idea that the book is "too demanding."
The point is that we haven't just changed as individuals: the environment around us has changed. We live immersed in a mental rhythm that is constantly stimulated, fragmented, and hyper-reactive. And when the moment to read finally arrives, we do so with a brain that is already exhausted, emptied by the continuous hyperactivity of the day.
Schools Taught Us to Read... Badly
Our difficulty with reading didn't start with smartphones: it has roots that go much deeper, back to our school desks. For years, the education system has privileged an approach oriented toward testing, not deep reading. With the arrival of standardized tests, daily practice changed drastically:
Short passages,
"Find the main idea" exercises,
Multiple-choice questions.
Not whole books, but fragments. Not immersion, but rapid information extraction. We became excellent at passing exams and assessments, but not so good at staying inside a text. School, however unintentionally, trained speed, not endurance:
Little exposure to long narratives,
Little practice in prolonged concentration,
Lots of fast reading, very little "reading stamina."
Today, the effects are clearly visible: intelligent, capable, prepared adults... who burn out after ten pages. Reading a long book becomes like running a marathon without ever having done any real training.
Simply put: school taught us to sprint, but it never prepared us to go the distance.
AI Made Us Impatient, Not Stupid
Among all the reflections on how digital tech is changing our relationship with reading, one strikes with particular clarity: Artificial Intelligence hasn't made us less intelligent, it has made us less patient. It doesn't impoverish our cognitive capacity, but it erodes something equally essential: the willingness to slowly traverse an idea.
AI is, by nature, a shortcut. A powerful one. In seconds, it can distill the key concepts of a 300-page book, filter out the "filler," isolate the 50 truly precious pages, and even apply the content to our work or life. The result is that every time we open a book, an inner voice—fed by the speed of AI—whispers: "Why are you reading all this? You could already have the answer."
This feeling changes everything. It is no longer just a question of distraction: it is a new paradigm of value. Why dedicate hours to following an author's thread when a model can offer you the "useful part" immediately? Traditional reading begins to seem inefficient, slow, almost antiquated.
But the real risk isn't losing information—AI gives us plenty of that. The risk is losing the rhythm of slow thought, the kind only a book can teach.
Reading a text from start to finish serves not only to know concepts: it serves to reside inside an idea, to let oneself be transformed by the progression of the reasoning. A book forces us to follow the author's path step by step, to share doubts, turns, and intuitions. Slowness is not a defect: it is the condition through which an external thought can become our own.
AI, conversely, makes us masters of rapid extraction, of the distillate, of the useful fragment. The paradox is that it distracts us not with nonsense—like social media feeds—but with good information. This makes it even more insidious: it gives us the feeling of learning more, better, and faster. So the guilt of "not reading" fades, and the patience to do so evaporates.
And yet, what makes reading irreplaceable is not the quantity of information transferred, but the depth of the imprint it leaves. It is the experience of letting oneself be inhabited by a thought that grows page after page, until it models our perception.
Yet, Those Who Build the Future... Read
There is a fact that completely flips the narrative on the crisis of reading: the busiest, most visionary, and most successful people in the world continue to read voraciously. For them, reading is not a hobby, nor a luxury: it is a lever. One of the most powerful ones in existence.
Reading as Strategic Leverage
Every book is a condensation of years of experience packed into a few hours. An author might dedicate five, ten, sometimes twenty years to researching, experimenting, failing, and reflecting. When they write a book, that entire journey is compressed and made transferable. As Steven Kotler says, reading means transforming decades of someone else’s wisdom into a few evenings on the couch.
This is why those who lead companies, projects, and cultural movements read almost obsessively: reading offers the best Return on Investment (ROI) imaginable. It is a knowledge accelerator. A competitive advantage.
The Habits of Leaders
Warren Buffett spends more than five hours a day immersed in books. Bill Gates reads about fifty books a year. Self-made entrepreneurs declare in 85% of cases that they read at least two books a month. For many of them, reading is as essential as breathing.
They don't do it because they have too much time on their hands. They do it because they cannot afford not to. Reading keeps them lucid, informed, innovative. It feeds critical thinking, updates their mental model of the world, and sparks new ideas before they exist in the market.
Training the Cognitive Muscles of the Future
But the value of reading is not just informational: it is physiological, mental, and cultural. Books train exactly what the digital world is eroding:
Deep concentration,
Cognitive patience,
The ability to follow long reasoning,
Imagination and empathy,
Independent thought.
The digital world trains us for multi-tracking, rapid stimuli, and fragmentation. Reading, instead, brings us back to the rhythm of slow thought—the kind necessary to create, to innovate, to make lucid decisions. It is the mental equivalent of endurance training: without it, any intellectual marathon becomes impossible.
Starting Again: Small Acts of Rebellion
Resuming reading doesn't require inner revolutions: just start with tiny, almost humble gestures. Five pages a day. An environment without distractions. A book chosen not out of duty, but out of authentic curiosity.
"Curiosity beats discipline" is not a motivational phrase: it is a neuropsychological law. When interest is sincere, the mind opens, resists, and stays. The effort dissolves.
But there is something even deeper: today, reading is a counter-cultural act. In a world that pushes us to be fast, fragmented, and continuously elsewhere, opening a book means choosing to slow down. It means staying. It means going deep while everything around us invites us to the surface.
It is a gesture of presence. An exercise in lucidity. A small, powerful declaration of humanity.
Why I Do It, Really
As I work on faisportleggiunlibro.it, I realize that this project isn't just about young people: it's about me. It’s about my relationship with time, with concentration, with learning. It’s about the desire to reclaim a mental space that is currently under siege.
The truth is, we aren't just losing the habit of reading. We are risking losing a way of thinking.
And perhaps the truly urgent question isn't: "How do we read more?" But rather: "What depth of thought are we losing if we stop?"
And it is this question—more than any other—that drives me to read more today.
