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“In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero. You’d be amazed at how much Warren [Buffett] reads—and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I’m a book with a couple of legs sticking out.”
Where Have All The Readers Gone?
In June of 2025, the Oklahoma City Thunder became the second youngest team ever to win an NBA championship when they raised the Larry O’Brien trophy after defeating the Indiana Pacers in Game 7 of the Finals. The average age of the roster was 25.6 years old.
Almost every player on that team is a member of Generation Z, including their 7 foot 1 inch starting center, Chet Holmgren. Holmgren unwittingly caused a slight stir in the news toward the beginning of that same season for a matter that had nothing to do with basketball.
About halfway through a 10-minute video interview with GQ, he pulls out a stack of his favorite books. Every single one of them are coffee table books. He preemptively points this out, and then makes the following remarks:
“Another reason I also love these books is I dropped out of college, so too many words on the page kind of hurts my brain… so it’s always good when there are a lot of pictures in there, which I think is pretty cool.”
In some niche corners of NBA coverage, word began to spread that “Chet Holmgren is on record saying he’s never read a book.”
While that assumption is not technically true, the interview raised two questions for me:
Is it possible that a 22-year-old can make it through high school (and in his case, one year of college) without ever reading a single book?
When did “too many words on the page kind of hurts my brain” become acceptable enough to say in a GQ interview that would be seen by hundreds of thousands of people?
I have no interest in picking on Holmgren—he’s been extremely successful in his own right. As a basketball fan, I’ve enjoyed watching him play.
I share this story because I don’t think he is an outlier.
He’s the rule, not the exception.
If you’ve wisened up to the notion that reducing your screen time by any means necessary is a worthy endeavor, you’ve probably started to see some progress.
For many, the experience of taking a 24-hour digital Sabbath or going phone-less for extended amounts of time is strange. What does one do with all the extra time? Sleep? Eat? Give up and grab the phone?
I have one recommendation: read.
Few trends alarm me more than the decline of reading amongst teenagers.
1 in 2 teenagers report they hardly ever read in their leisure time. Forty years ago, that number was around 1 in 7:
Source: John Burn-Murdoch, FT
In the U.S., smartphone adoption surpassed 50% in the year 2012. This was also the year that apps like Instagram and Snapchat gained widespread popularity among teens. With this in mind, look at the chart above one more time. You’ll notice an inflection point.
But it’s not just teenagers. “Reading for fun” by US adults has fallen by 40% since 2003. Across the board, Americans are reading less and less.
Unfortunately, this trend does not come without consequences.
A few months ago, I stumbled across a clip of James Marriott from the Times of London drawing a connection between the decline of reading and another well documented trend:
When you look at the way that information is structured in a book compared to the way the information is structured in a phone, it makes a lot of sense.
Books are exceptionally dense with information, they're exceptionally dense with argument.
Print requires us to make a logical case for a subject. …You can't just assert things in the way you can on Tik Tok or on YouTube or on a podcast or in conversation.
And print privileges a whole way of thinking and a whole way of processing the world that is logical, that is more rational, that is more dense with information, that is more intellectually challenging.
And if you lose these things in our culture, which I think we really are in the process of losing them, it's not surprising that people are getting stupider and their reasoning skills are declining and that we seem to find the IQ is declining…”
Books—based on their structural qualities—require a certain kind of cognitive processing that strengthens our minds and makes us better thinkers. Thus, less reading equals lower intelligence.
I don’t think we need peer-reviewed studies to convince us. Can’t you feel a difference between the version of yourself that reaches for a book and the version of yourself that reaches for your phone?
We’ve traded Orwell, Dante, and Tolstoy for Instagram, X, and Snapchat. And we’re paying the price.
In the last year or so, my family mysteriously came into possession of a very old copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.
Genuinely, I have no idea where this came from.
As I was reading it to my four-year-old, I was struck by the prescience of the Oompa Loompa song that follows the unfortunate demise of television-obsessed Mike Teavee.
“The most important thing we’ve learned,
So far as children are concerned,
Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
Them near your television set—
Or better still, just don’t install
The idiotic thing at all.
In almost every house we’ve been,
We’ve watched them gaping at the screen.
They loll and slop and lounge about,
And stare until their eyes pop out.
…
Oh yes, we know it keeps them still,
They don’t climb out the window sill,
They never fight or kick or punch,
They leave you free to cook the lunch
And wash the dishes in the sink—
But did you ever stop to think,
To wonder just exactly what
This does to your beloved tot?
IT ROTS THE SENSES IN THE HEAD!
IT KILLS IMAGINATION DEAD!
IT CLOGS AND CLUTTERS UP THE MIND!
IT MAKES A CHILD SO DULL AND BLIND
…
‘All right!’ you’ll cry. ‘All right!’ you’ll say,
‘But if we take the set away,
What shall we do to entertain
Our darling children? Please explain!’
We’ll answer this by asking you,
‘What used the darling ones to do?
‘How used they keep themselves contented
Before this monster was invented?’
Have you forgotten? Don’t you know?
We’ll say it very loud and slow:
THEY…USED…TO…READ! They’d READ and READ,
AND READ and READ, and then proceed
To READ some more. Great Scott! Gadzooks!
One half their lives was reading books!
The nursery shelves held books galore!
Books cluttered up the nursery floor!
And in the bedroom, by the bed,
More books were waiting to be read!
Such wondrous, fine, fantastic takes
Of dragons, gypsies, queens, and whales
And treasure isles, and distant shores
Where smugglers rowed with muffled oars,
And pirates wearing purple pants,
And sailing ships and elephants,
…
Oh, books, what books they used to know,
Those children living long ago!
So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,
Go throw your TV set away,
And in its place you can install
A lovely bookshelf on the wall.
…
Fear not, because we promise you
That, in about a week or two
Of having nothing else to do,
They’ll now begin to feel the need
Of having something good to read.
And once they start—oh boy, oh boy!
You watch the slowly growing joy
That fills their hears. They’ll grow so keen
They’ll wonder what they’d ever seen
In that ridiculous machine,
That nauseating, foul, unclean,
Repulsive television screen!
And later, each and every kid
Will love you more for what you did.
I wonder what they would have thought about smartphones.
Don’t succumb to the lie that you’re not a reader. If you have had that thought in the last few minutes, catch yourself. You might not be a reader right now, but you can be.
Trading 20-minutes of scrolling for 20-minutes of reading will radically change your life.
You can start today.
(You too, Chet Holmgren.)
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Thanks for reading! See you next week.
PW