Why Writing Feels Impossible Now

When was the last time you - you, the one reading this - read a complete book, from start to finish, in a couple of days? Maybe even in a single day?

I ask this not to embarrass you, but because the answer reveals something profound about why writing feels like the most hopeless dream of them all here in 2025.

No, it's not AI that has killed or is killing writing. That's the convenient scapegoat everyone reaches for right now.

The real culprit is far more insidious and much harder to fix.

The Death of Deep Reading

There was a time, not so long ago, when finishing a book in a day wasn't remarkable. It could just be an average Tuesday.

In the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, you could come home with a stack of library books, the weight of them satisfying in your arms.

You'd pick one, crack it open - and disappear. Hours would pass unnoticed. The outside world would fade. You'd read until your eyes burned, until someone called you for dinner, until the book was finished and you sat there, slightly stunned, blinking back into reality.

Younger people look at me with genuine disbelief when I describe that world. They cannot fathom a time when reading a book in a single sitting was not just possible, but pretty common.

That world is gone, and it matters that it's gone.

The Attention Economy's Victory

Every surface in our lives now screams for attention. Our phones pulse with notifications. Our computers offer infinite rabbit holes.

Our televisions suggest what to watch next before we've finished what we're watching now. We've built a world designed to fracture focus, and then we wonder why no one reads anymore and why writing feels like the most ludicrous calling of all.

The average person checks their phone 96 times per day. That's once every ten minutes during waking hours. We've trained our brains to expect interruption, to crave the next hit of stimulation.

The sustained attention required to read a book has become as foreign as handwriting in cursive.

Writers know this. We feel it in our bones. We craft our sentences knowing they compete not just with other books, but with TikTok videos, push notifications, the infinite scroll of social media.

How do you write for readers who no longer truly exist?

The Paradox of Infinite Content

Yes - the literary world's stats are surprisingly encouraging. I know.

We live in an age of unprecedented literary abundance. More books are published each year than ever before in human history.

Amazon alone adds thousands of new titles daily. Self-publishing has democratized the written word.

Anyone can write a book, format it, and have it available worldwide within hours.

And yet this abundance has created its own form of scarcity: the scarcity of attention.

When everything is available, nothing feels urgent.

Writers face the impossible task of standing out in an ocean of content. Even if we succeed, we know the reader is probably reading in one-minute chunks between checking Instagram.

Without readers who read, what's the point of writers?

The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Writer

Writing has always been solitary, but it was never supposed to be isolated.

Writers once had communities. Literary scenes. Magazine cultures. Regular readers who followed their work. Editors who cared about sentences, not just sales figures. Reviewers who took books seriously as cultural artifacts worthy of sustained attention.

Now writers shout into the void of social media, hoping our tweet about our new novel will pierce through the noise.

The literary community has fragmented into niche audiences and echo chambers.

Genre writers talk to genre readers. Literary writers talk to literary writers. Wandering madmen complain about it in articles like this one.

The broad, curious readership that once sustained a diverse ecosystem of writers has splintered into a thousand micro-audiences, none large enough to support more than a handful of writers.

Why We Keep Writing Anyway

Despite all this, people still write. Not because it makes rational sense to, but because it doesn't make sense not to.

Writing persists as an act of faith.

Faith that somewhere, someone still wants to be transported by words. Faith that stories still matter in a world that seems to have forgotten how to listen.

Writers write because the alternative world is unacceptable to them. That world would be one without new stories, without fresh perspectives, without the particular magic that happens when language captures something true.

We write consciously into a void. Hoping our words will find the few readers who still remember how to submerge themselves into worlds of words.

The dream feels hopeless because it is hopeless, by any measure.

But the best dreams always are.