Why read books, aren’t the other mediums better?

No. Books are still king when it comes to nourishing your mind. But why?

• “… validating your opinions is the opposite of the point of reading anything”

I hadn’t given this much thought until I read Ernest Hemingway. Before that, I had read good books, and I had seen good movies and TV shows, both written by people much smarter than me; however, I always felt less productive when watching TV, even if it was a masterpiece of a series. But why?

Multiple reasons:

1. The range of experiences that are allowed on TV pale in comparison to those found in books. This is because networks and show producers have different incentives to produce this different kind of art, a much dirtier incentive that really kills the ingenuity of a film, and especially of a TV shows. The main incentives for producers are a desire to appeal to the largest volume of people (which in turn means appealing to the least common denominator of perspectives, or the perspective with the largest total available market) simply for the advertisement or subscription revenue. This monetary incentive forces shows to dilute the diversity of perspectives to only the ones that just about everyone can understand AND be ok with talking about with their friends over dinner. This means a ton of potentially offensive (but extremely valuable) material is automatically off the table. They exclude material that is largely not agreeable or palatable to many people or material that doesn’t have wide appeal or awareness, and instead of sitting with the cognitive dissonance, producers must put volume, and in turn money, first.
2. Producers desperately want to avoid being hanged in the gallows of cancel culture, so they slap a cover of uniqueness over the bare bones of more least common denominator garbage that makes people think they are watching a thought provoking show. This way, the critics and consumers can engage in the shows within intellectual “bumper lanes” that they can’t see because the content is so diluted and recycled, that that’s all they have ever known. Take a show like “13 reasons why” as an example. It exists to spark conversation and debate about what it’s like to live as a teenager now and it tried to teach us about the ways in which bullying can spiral out of control. This show pushes the envelope for sure, but it still keeps you in the lanes of the dramatized cookie cutter fantasy land. The bones of the themes look familiar, but the show is still just fantasy drama. In real life, being a teenager is far more grey, as is true for almost any example you can think of. These shows try to raise awareness to issues with an idealized method that makes you think there is an “easy button” that makes the problems go away. That’s simply an example, but every show ever is the same thing. A pretty face stiched onto a set of 5–10 heavily recycled ideas and themes.

So what makes books different, and why should you absolutely read more?

Read an amazing author like Ernest Hemingway. Just one story. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, for instance. He tells you an extremely detailed story of a man facing death having contracted gangrene from an infection on a safari. This is a perspective I have no relation to, but the little insights infused in the detailed writing were astounding. Just go read one story.

Books usually also go through publishers, but they are in general just much more difficult and time intensive to create. Aside from the viciously meticulous revising and editing process, where the author must go back through their work and stress test each thought and description to make sure their words properly conveyed the message, the act of writing about our ideas is one of the most natural things we do, yet the most difficult to do well. The art of translating an entire human experience into language form is incredibly hard, and when done well, it is currently the best way to communicate different human perspectives well. Narratives do this particularly well, because the author must set the setting, and also go inside the mind of the characters and translate their actual experience along with their perspective on the experience itself. Good writing takes you through the full cycle of human experience from sensory stimulation, encoding, forming thoughts, and acting on those thoughts. Most other mediums can only do 1/3 to 1/2 of those at once.

You never get the full story.

All other mediums of communication are just less granular symbols of the actual message, and much gets lost in translation. Music is entirely symbolic, video/audio are almost exclusively third person simply because one needs a camera to produce a scene, and painting/photos are simply snapshots of an experience. They are all great in their own ways, but are lacking in the ability to show what was going through a characters mind, and show in depth what really motivates them.

It is exactly this experience that is so far impossible to fully replicate and transfer from person to person, but writing is our best tool by far. Writing is a direct entry point into another person’s raw state of mind. If you want to actually gain new perspective, then apart from living new experiences, reading about them is the only 2nd option.

We are entirely alone in our observations, meaning nobody knows what it’s like to be you, and nobody truly knows what makes you what you are, but writing about your experiences and thoughts can help you relate to others, and others relate to you. And reading builds your ability to imagine new worlds and possibilities, all while increasing your empathy. That sounds like a fluffy statement, but until you turn off the TV and read a few books, only then will you realize just how much of your life is built for you, and reading gives you ammo in your ability to take back control over your own life experience. When people are spoon fed content, they often live life with the choices they are given. When people learn to flex that muscle of empathy and thinking through other perspectives (even ones you don’t agree with, because validating your opinions is the opposite of the point of reading), they can construct new choices for themselves. This goes not only for big life decisions, but also for how your create and maintain day to day relationships. Reading helps you strip your ego and allows you to try to understand an idea in depth to potentially expand how you see your life and the world it fits in.

If you want an extremely effective way of improving your life, read something, and then try to watch out for things in your life that you do or tolerate simply because it was put there.

Ask yourself constantly, “Did I choose this? What was my reasoning for choosing this? Does that reasoning still matter? Where did I get this thought? Do I need to have an opinion?”

If you begin reading consistently, you will find that the answers to these questions change often, and drastically.