It's Rude to Read

against socially mandated distraction

Nobody can read anymore. People are always saying it: they’re saying it here on Substack. They’re saying it on social media and they’re saying it to one another in person. I’m one of the people saying it: I can’t read like I once did! When we were kids we’d stay up for hours on a schoolnight, finishing a book. We’d read in the back of the car on road trips, or on the way to soccer practice. Nothing could distract us.

Not so, now. Short-form video, endless scroll, the Algorithms: they’ve occupied our minds and made us incapable of sustained focus on anything at all. We live in an age of distraction and we feel guilty about it.

Our superegos want to read. We know that reading would be fun, if only we could do it. We want to want to read, everyone says. But we can’t! And sometimes, I do feel as if my book is medicine and my phone is candy. I want the candy, but I know that I should want the medicine, and that if I take it, I’ll feel better.

But that isn’t the whole story. Yes, I am easily distracted. My phone has chipped away at my ability to hold on to a thought or, frankly, at my ability to do anything other than look at my phone. At the same time, though, it seems to me that our inability to just read a book comes partially not from phone addiction or shortened attention spans in and of themselves, but also out of new social norms born out of those conditions. In other words: it’s rude to read.

Sometimes, as I said before, my book feels like medicine to the candy of social media. But much of the time the reverse is true. The book is the candy. The book is what I most impulsively want. I don’t just think that I should read: I want to read and I like doing it.

And yet, with others around, I often reach for the phone and not the book. I’m talking specifically about situations where you’re just existing in the same space as someone else. Lounging mostly-dressed before heading off to dinner, or riding the train as a group. The equivalent of sitting in the back of the car as a kid, being driven to soccer practice. A lull in the conversation comes around. And one by one, each member of the group takes out their phone.

I often feel, in these situations, that I’d very much like to read a book instead. Usually I have one with me, on my bedside table if I’m home or in my bag if I’m out. When I think about all the cumulative minutes I’ve spent idly looking at my phone, sort of vaguely waiting for a friend to come out of the bathroom or for the Uber to arrive, I feel rather sad. I could have enjoyed those minutes much more, in many cases, if I’d just read the book I wanted to read. But I didn’t, because it felt somehow impolite, even if only in my head—I’m not egotistical enough to imagine anyone truly gives a shit how I spend my idle moments, and yet.¹

Usually, we talk about the distraction of the smartphone era as a very bad thing. But in these kinds of half-social moments, when we’re all looking at our phones, I think we’re instead treating that distraction as a virtue or form of politeness. Taking out your phone, the infamous distraction device, indicates that you aren’t really engaged in anything important: you’re more than happy to be pulled back into conversation or to switch gears. Meanwhile, taking out a book while everyone hangs out—even if people aren’t speaking or directly interacting —feels like a turning-away. It indicates that, if the conversation were to start up again, you might be disinterested, or even annoyed, or might simply not partake. If dishes need washing or diapers changing or trains transferring, you would, again, be loath to put down the book and do what needs to be done.

I have started to think of this problem as one of socially mandated distraction. As we all become more and more distracted, more and more addicted to our phones, any display of or attempt at focus starts to actually seem increasingly odd and rare and extreme. In an age of epidemic distraction, focus looks pointed. I’ve noticed, personally, that the pressure not to read is often strongest when there are young children around, or lots of ambient domestic demands, and I’ve noticed anecdotally that it seems rather stronger among women. It reminds me of the way my grandmother used to always take the chair closest to the kitchen at dinner, so that she could hop up at a moment’s notice to refill a plate or warm up dessert. The phone is the seat by the kitchen. Focus is a luxury. It’s unseemly to flaunt it or to want it too badly, or to hoard it, pushing the burden of distractibility onto others.

I am not trying here to depict myself as some kind of long-suffering intellectual, forced to partake in the inane behaviors of broader society or whatever. For one thing, many of the people I spend time with socially are also readers. Many of them read more than I do, and many of them, like me, complain about the chronic distraction that makes it difficult to sit down with a book. But in a group setting, distraction becomes an expectation and a norm, so that each individual’s desire to reclaim their focus becomes secondary to the demands of socially mandated distraction.

This concerns me partly because I like reading books. I am old enough to know that it hasn’t always been like this, and that it used to be more normal, less noticeable, for someone to read a book while casually socializing with others. Of course, when I was a kid, it was common to leaf through a newspaper or print magazine when others were around. I suppose this was the equivalent of looking halfheartedly at your phone: —a lower-commitment alternative to reading a full book. But, for one thing, even skimming a back issue of Us Weekly feels more focused and frankly more rewarding than my own habit of opening Instagram and closing it again five times. Also, I think that the medium itself matters here. Many people do, of course, look at their phone in order to read the news or a magazine article. But you can’t see that they’re doing so, the way that you can see someone is reading the print paper. When other people in the room are on their phones, you can’t see what they are doing. They become closed off to you, the back of their phone case a tinted window separating them from those around them.

Which brings me, I guess, to the second reason I find this evolution concerning. I like reading, but I also like hanging out. Like I said earlier, we tend to look at our phones out of an inarticulate sense that it is the polite option—the choice that will put others at ease or at least avoid drawing attention.² But I would personally much prefer to be in a room full of people people reading books, or playing music, or playing card games even though I hate every card game, rather than scrolling aimlessly, waiting to be drawn into something more interesting. There is a warmth in this kind of coexistence, a sense of relaxation and camaraderie and comfort while each absorbed in something separate. In moments of aimless scrolling and socially mandated distraction, however, what I tend to feel is a lingering anxiety in the air, as if nobody feels quite at ease enough to just put down the phone and do what they actually want to be doing. For the sake not just of our literary ones but also of our social ones—and in particular for the sake of those aimless in-between moments of togetherness, which taken together add up to real closeness—it might be necessary to refuse distraction. Even if it seems, on the surface, like the politest course of action.

1. I can already imagine that someone is going to respond to this by saying something like “You shouldn’t look at your phone OR read when other people are there. You should interact with the people around you!” My response to this is that, unless you spend much of your time alone, a normal social or family life simply includes many of these intervals of waiting or of comfortable silence. I’m a pretty big talker and I encounter this all the time in every intimate social group I’m a part of.

2. Many people do talk about reading as a way to draw attention, with men, for instance, joking about reading authors like Sally Rooney in order to attract women. But this is the other side of the coin: reading looks a bit ostentatious now, and so is, at least in theory, a good way to get people to notice you.