reading is good for you, actually

they say that reading is good for you. they say that people should read books. they say that books make you smarter.

and i can tell you now with resolute certainty that yes, they do in fact make you smarter, it is good for you, and you should read books.

hell, it doesn't even have to be a book persay. it can be a magazine, or a book of poems, or a newspaper. whatever. text on a piece of paper. that's all.

the reason why reading is better for you than watching or listening is because of one simple reason: reading takes effort. it works out your brain in a way that watching television or listening to a podcast or the radio simply cannot and will never do.

in order to read, you have to think about the words being said. you visualize the scenarios in your head and slowly process the information. meanwhile when you're watching tv, you kinda just sit there staring at it. it's passive and doesn't require any effort to absorb information. so while yes, you can watch the news instead of reading a newspaper and still get the information and remember it, but it doesn't make you smarter or better after the fact. you just kinda absorb it and it goes... somewhere.

reading books (i mainly read fiction btw) has, in a twist of events that i genuinely did not expect, made the internet kinda boring. it lives in it's own area now and it's not something i immediately want to jump into. i have better control over my habits, but that's also due to conscious efforts to mitigate internet use in all it's forms over the past year or so. for some reason, we stopped reading. i vividly remember back in my freshman year of high school, i was sitting in a study hall reading a book for the first time since elementary school, and towards the front of the room, this kid, redneck-country type, is watching these fishing video compilations. the teacher of this particular study hall was that if you didn't have work or studying that needed to get done, you either had to read, draw, or play one of her board games. unless it was a laptop with an assignment pulled up, you absolutely could not look at a screen. so the teacher comes up to this kid, several times mind you, telling him to do work or read a book. the kid says "who reads books anymore?"

i don't know why, but that moment has always stuck with me. and even before i was radicalized into anti-tech, digital minimalism philosophies, i genuinely felt bad for him. he was so screenpilled that he couldn't even grasp the idea of reading a book. and yeah, maybe he said that because he just wanted the teacher to go away so he could keep watching his fishing videos, but at the same time, he rejected the notion of even wanting to read so that he could watch more fishing videos.

i hope that guy's doing alright.

so anyway yeah you should read books. an illiterate society is a society easily controlled, after all.