Smartphones and the Decline of Reading: An Intellectual Health Crisis

I feel like that. At least more like that than I’m comfortable with. I’m a novelist and I present programs about thinking on the BBC, and yet even I am finding that I’m reading less than I used to. It seems more of an effort and less of a consistent, persistent habit than it was. I hate this feeling. I still have the habit of acquiring books, buying them, getting them from libraries, being sent them. And I do still read. Compared with many people, I probably read an enormous amount, but I know it’s not as much as I used to read. And I know where the time has gone.

It is, of course, the damn phones.

The other day I was sitting with a friend who is a doctor and an expert in public health – that is, large-scale interventions that might improve the health of millions of people by a tiny bit. I found myself saying: “I don’t think it’s a coincidence that smartphones are about the same size and shape as a packet of cigarettes.” We talked about how the really massive public health crisis from tobacco was caused by the arrival of cheap mass-market cigarettes, which you could smoke endlessly without having to do the ritual of emptying, cleaning and refilling your pipe, and which were not as expensive as cigars. We talked about how people didn’t know, when they started smoking those cheap mass-market cigarettes during the first world war, how deadly they would be. We talked about how it’s not our fault.

My friend said that he too misses his regular reading habit. I think of him as an avid reader, but we’re remembering each other from a few years ago. In the trenches in the first world war, men smoked cigarettes to steady their nerves. During the pandemic, when we couldn’t speak to each other in person or give each other a hug, we all got glued to our smartphones. It’s not our fault, but we are going to have to fix it now. My friend said that he wished someone would do a couch to 5k-style training program for reading. And then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The problems of people not reading are well documented. Students are apparently arriving at university unable to read a whole book. A 2024 report by the OECD has found that literacy has declined or stagnated in most developed countries. In his forthcoming book, The New Dark Ages, James Marriott traces the problems for society that are increasingly coming out of a lack of literacy. Marriott argues that when we’re not reading, we’re increasingly unable to follow complex arguments and find the problems with them. We tend to be more swayed by cartoonish figures with simple slogans we can repeat. We will believe gossip and treat it seriously rather than thinking through the intellectual ideas behind politics or business.

It’s a public health crisis of intellectual health, and most governments don’t seem minded to do anything about it. It’s the damn phones, but dealing with the phones means tussling with the massively wealthy American technology companies that are protected by Donald Trump. It would be straightforward to force technology companies to give us ways to use the useful services on the phones with all the pernicious features turned off. But it would take political will to do it.

While we’re waiting, if nobody is going to do it for us, for now, we’re going to need to do what we can for ourselves.

So I thought about the couch to 5k for reading, how you could do it. I worked on designing the couch to 5k for my running app Zombies, Run several years ago, so I know the theory. When I mentioned the idea on my Substack newsletter, Whatever Works, readers bit my hand off with excitement (much like a zombie). It suddenly seemed very urgent. There is no more time to wait.

We used to live in a world where the only way to get information, or to be entertained, or to simply pass the time when you were waiting, or queueing, or on a bus, was reading. Well, we also used to live in a world where the only way to get places was to walk. Then we invented technologies that are very useful in some ways, but we had to take on exercise programs to help us get enough movement in our lives. That’s where we are with reading now.

We just need to accept that and get on with it.

So I’ve designed a program. Eight weeks, with three separate tracks. It’s mostly for people like me, who remember that they had a life-sustaining reading habit once but feel that it has somehow fallen away. Over eight weeks, we are working ourselves back to reading half an hour every day, with two or three longer sessions during the week. There are also tracks for people who are really time-limited and just want to be reading 20 minutes a day, and people who feel that they’re basically still reading, but know that they are shying away from the more challenging stuff they want to be tackling.

The response has been extraordinary. After the first week of the program, people are already saying that they’re finding their morning routine goes more quickly now they’re not brain-fogged from scrolling first thing, that reading in stressful times is making them feel calmer and not more anxious as scrolling did, that they can watch a long film without being tempted to look at their phone. They are rediscovering the simple joy of being gripped by a great book after as few as two or three days of working on this together. Fans have put together homemade digital and printable trackers to keep themselves motivated. Teachers are already asking me how to introduce this idea into schools.

It’s really exciting to find out how easy it is to put this right. The program is running right now, and if you’re reading this, you’re not too late to join. Just start from the beginning. All you have to do is put down your phone, pick up a book, and read for 10 minutes. That’s day one.

There is so much joy in books, and it’s all still there waiting for us. All we have to do is take it back from the technology billionaires, one day of reading at a time.