When We Stopped Reading: On the Lost Art of Feeling Deeply

There was a time when people carried books like sacred objects. Folded pages stained with coffee and fingerprints, verses underlined in pencil, words whispered between lovers as secret codes. A time when we met ourselves — or who we could be — in the lives of fictional characters, when heartbreaks were rehearsed in pages long before they found us in real life. But something shifted.

We still read, yes. We scroll. We tap. We consume headlines, reels, captions carefully trimmed to hold our attention for no more than seven seconds. But do we read, in the old, intimate way? The kind of reading that asked for silence and presence, the kind that left us aching, thinking, changed?

Fewer people read books today. That’s no secret. Between streaming services, social media, and the race for productivity, books have become relics of a slower time. The long pause. The luxury of attention. And maybe we tell ourselves that life is too fast now — who has time for 400 pages of internal monologue when emails flood in at 2 a.m. and the world is always on fire?

But I wonder — as we stopped reading, what else did we leave behind?

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but I have noticed something else too: we seem less soft these days. Less romantic. Less willing to feel big feelings without shame. Love is often ironic now, tenderness is filtered through memes, and vulnerability is something we schedule between therapy sessions and deadlines. There’s a hardness creeping in — a defense mechanism, perhaps — but I can’t help wondering if it’s also the result of no longer living among stories.

Because literature never asked us to be efficient. It asked us to feel.

It taught us how to sit with discomfort, to unravel motivations, to fall in love slowly with someone’s mind. It showed us what longing sounds like in a sentence. What sorrow looks like when stretched across an entire chapter. It invited us to see the world through another’s eyes — a child’s, a murderer’s, a ghost’s, a woman abandoned by time. And in doing so, it made us better at being human.

In books, we were allowed to hurt without needing a solution. We mourned characters as though they were real people. We discovered the exact words to describe our quietest thoughts. We held metaphors in our mouths like lozenges on difficult days. And in the process, our own emotions found space to bloom. Messy, inconvenient, poetic emotions.

Now, I meet people who haven’t read a novel in years. People who find love in dating apps but are terrified of calling it love. People who would rather text for hours than sit in silence with someone and just be. There is nothing wrong with progress, with technology — but there is something tragic in the absence of slowness, of introspection, of stories that don’t fit in a TikTok. Because stories taught us how to wait.

To wait for a letter. To wait for a character to grow. To wait for the slow burn of attraction to build into something worth falling into. Romance in literature was never instant. It was layered. It was filled with misunderstandings, with yearning glances, with missed trains and returned books and unspoken truths. It was sacred, not transactional.

Can we still feel that way now, in a world that rewards speed over depth?

I think we can. But we might have to reclaim it. Start small.

Pick up the book that’s been gathering dust on your shelf. Let it ruin your day in the best way. Read a paragraph that makes you cry and send it to someone who will understand. Remember what it felt like to read The Little Prince for the first time, or to stay up all night with a story that wouldn't let you go. Carry a novel in your bag, not just your phone. Read to your partner. To your friend. To yourself, in bed at night, when the world finally goes quiet.

Because when we stopped reading, we didn’t just lose the stories — we lost a piece of ourselves.

Books remind us that it’s okay to feel deeply. That there’s beauty in confusion, in longing, in not knowing. They remind us that being soft is not a weakness, that love is not embarrassing, that the world is vast and layered and filled with strange, broken, beautiful people trying to make sense of their lives — just like us.

And maybe, just maybe, if we return to reading, we might remember how to return to each other.