Reading for pleasure is sharply down among schoolkids, report shows

It depends on what they are doing on the device, 100%. When I was a kid I got a GameBoy, one of those old red ones, played tetris or Mario Land for an hour and after that it was boring and I did something else. Got an N64 which was already way more engaging, but even then after an hour or two I was done.

It just got worse the more sophisticated games became. And now we have infinite videos and content, infinite scrolling and such. How is a child supposed to withstand this onslaught? I only managed this by uninstalling YouTube and all apps with shorts.

It's not even just kids, this is true for all people to be honest. Not saying we should go back to an agrarian society but maybe unrestricted access to dopamine slot machines isn't a good idea for your brain.

I don't know how old your kids are and if they play video games with friends, so maybe they're too young for this to begin with.

Do you give them some kind of additional time budget that they can manage themselves over a longer period? There are things that you can do on a screen that just take more time than one hour at once, especially when you're playing with friends (or even learning something by programming etc.).

Absolutely. I was homeschooled growing up, and my parents were fairly strict about screentime. We read anything we could get our hands on, and I feel like I'm a happier, healthier adult today because of it.

While I'm now on my phone too much, and I don't read fiction as much as I used to, I'm grateful for those foundations.

The friction and discomfort that come from reading/exercising/learning/growing is so important, and I hope we can find a healthier balance for the next generation.

It’s devices but also parents. If parents don’t read books everyday, kids won’t either.

How old are the kids? Honestly two hours of screens and devices seems like a lot to me, so I'm surprised that's where you cut down to. How much were they using them before? But my kids are young, so it's probably different if you're talking about like teens or something.

You may have noticed the same behavioural issues amongst your adult friends or at times in yourself. I know I have. Anytime I give up doom scrolling for a week or two I feel instantly less anxious about the world and everything going on around me.

Social media is a plague and will likely be looked on by the psychiatric/medical professional as extremely harmful in years to come. Something akin to smoking.

Just for some perspective, my kids get about 1 hour of screen time a day, and a lot of my friends are shocked at how much they watch. I'm glad you made this change and saw the positive effect, especially to the extent that they started choosing other activities over screen time, but I can't image how much they were watching before you "cut down" to 2 hours a day, and how you could have felt that that was OK for children?

> It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

That anyone is pretending otherwise is mind boggling to me.

It is the phones fault and it affects more than kids. You see too many parents and grandparents buried on the phones. At least with boomers the tech adoption isnt as high

We should recognize its not a generational issue but something that affects us all-young and old

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> asking to do things outside like learning to ride bikes

They sound deprived, why haven't you got them a bike if you're complaining about screen time?

> It's such a huge difference. It is the devices. It's 100% the devices.

You sound like you're convincing yourself here.

Kids do what parents do, and what parents allow them to do. Allowing X hours daily gaming/screens is already bad parenting (depending on age but we talk about kids here), like it or not ask psychologists. At the end its just same genes & upbringing from the same genes (or failure to do so and ie nanny picks up).

Everything else is just an empty blah. Every single time there is unruly kid, I look at parental behaviors and its pretty obvious. Reverse is also true - every properly caring involved parent has much better behaving kid(s) around.

I read an Economist article a few years ago that mentioned a literature professor at Columbia who said that most his undergrad freshmen students have never read a book cover to cover. Of those that have, their favorites were young adult fiction. Most of his students couldn't even focus on a single sonnet.

Apparently kids nowadays are having difficulty focusing on individual sentences, and a lot of them are just effectively illiterate. This just blows me away. I'm roughly your age and sometimes as a kid, during the summer, I'd do nothing for days but read nonstop, sunrise to sunset if I liked the book, and I knew a bunch of kids who would do the same thing. They weren't even what you'd call huge readers. It's just what you did if you were bored, or had an okay book with nothing else to do.

At the risk of a flamewar I want to say that I still don't accept audiobooks as a 100% drop in replacement for actually reading. I know a lot of millenials my age who insist that listening to an audiobook while <driving/cleaning/walking/biking/cooking> is completely the same as actually sitting down and focusing without distractions on a paper book for hours. But it isn't! Firstly, much is lost without seeing the formatting of the page, and without being able to flip back to an earlier page easily to re-read something. Secondly, sitting down and reading develops concentration and focus.

I'm interested in hearing the opinions of people who agree or disagree with my take. I'm not saying audiobooks are bad, but, they are not at all equivalent to real reading.

> Personally, I'd drop technology from the classroom entirely.

Definitely. When I was in school we started to have projectors in classrooms but I honestly don't think they added much at all. Seeing a "modern" classroom with electronic whiteboards and tablets everywhere is horrifying.

I doubt any paedagogues were asking for this. What's more likely is Microsoft and Google realised there were education budgets all over the world they weren't yet harvesting.

Drop technology entirely and start failing them. You’ll never find an Asian school taking mercy on their kids.

fellow Fairfield County native here. Likely around the same age as you. I went to a great public school (I was a terrible student, crippling ADHD but that's another story for another day) in the southern half of the county. I'll let you guess which one. Also spent a few years in another of the top districts (west of the capital, again, easy to guess ;P) before making the move south.

It's NOT the schools. They are well funded and as you say, pretty helpless because teachers, even younger ones, just aren't able to deal with kids whose parents shoved a smartphone into their hands at age 3.

It's NOT the parents - in order to keep up with the jonses in those towns, you have to work like a dog and most likely, both parents are in high stress demanding environments in order to make enough to live there. I was fortunate that my dad did quite well for our family, but there's no way I could raise a kid in that environment.

It's the fucking devices, and the drive to put tech everywhere in the classroom. When I was a kid we had a single Mac in the classroom (besides the teacher's computer), mainly to dick around with Oregon Trail, Math Blaster, or some typing app. We wanted to play games? We went outside and played sports, or stayed inside and played games like scrabble or chess.

In high school we had to do genuine research 15-20+ page papers as early as Sophomore year. There was zero Wikipedia, much less ChatGPT or Claude.

Of course, a book, which requires attention, effort, and has no distractions, is not going to capture the attention and imagination of someone who has had the world and all of its distractions at their fingertips since they gained consciousness, and weren't made to socialize without devices.

And no, we cannot allow people to pass to the next grade without mastering the skills required of their current grade. This needs to be completely iron clad and not up for debate. I was nearly held back 3-4 times. I am an idiot. I was miles ahead of where elementary school and middle school kids are today. I don't care if a wealthy Ivy grad and his management consultant wife donate a bunch of money to make sure their kid can pass - if their kid can't read or write, their kid can't pass.

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Devil’s advocate: what’s the point? Is it important to have reading and writing skills if everything can be transcribed through AI? Or maybe it’s not directly important, but the ability to hold your attention on something for 30-60 minutes is? Is reading the best medium for education, or something more like Kahn Academy videos?

I also wonder how the Montessori schools are doing, since I believe they focus less on rote skill acquisition and more on creativity.

Herd mentality, anti-intellectual culture, poor reading skills, and ADHD are widespread issues. Those mothers sound lame, and ultimately the joke's on them. Reading is awesome, and making fun of someone for it just shows what basic bitches they are.

> these days

Bill Hicks, the standup comedian dead for over three decades already, had a now-classic bit about being challenged for reading by a waitress. Reading has always been uncool to some people.

For what it’s worth I think people have always been this way. I used to read during recess when I was in middle school. I usually could not wait to get back to my books. But the other kids saw this as profoundly antisocial. I wasn’t being antisocial exactly; I was pretty shy and had a very active imagination. Amusingly, the school bullies misinterpreted my bookishness as weakness. That changed when I (accidentally) knocked out a kid’s front teeth during a fight. I felt terrible about it but the bullying stopped immediately.

This undercurrent of anti-intellectualism has been around for a long time. I would just ignore the naysayers.

It's not that there's social pressure specifically against reading. Just that there's social pressure to conform, and most people aren't reading.

Similarly, people are socially allowed to be buried in their phones while at work and this doesn't get critized by managers much, but god help you if you had a magazine or book open when taking a short break.

I love the result of reading, and the occasional jolt I get when reading, but not the activity of reading. I need to consume the text word for word, scanning with my eyes. The thing that gets me most happened after I got into Hemmingway: everything in a book happens in the forefront. In a movie you can have things happening outside your span od attention. Not in a book. You can’t have a doorbell happening in the background - it’s explicit and relevant to the story (which has spawned a counter-culture of writers).

It's not about the reading. It's about: a) being different, and b) making them feel guilty for not reading themselves. I used to get the same for being vegetarian, for much the same reasons. These days it's less weird and, oddly, I feel like people are almost envious that I get to have a "cool" label and they don't. It's strange because it's quite easy to get the label yourself if you want it, but it's hard to change habits.

It always has been negative attention gathering - reading marks you as a nerd.

And yeah, by far the strongest predictor I've ever seen for "does the kid do X that everyone agrees is good for people to do" is always "do the parents do it?". You lead by example. Kids are great at picking up on whether you enjoy it or not.

I think this is how Beauty And The Beast opens.

Is this in the united states? The usa has a shockingly anti-intellectual culture and has been so for my whole life.

I read a lot too, but it’s somewhere around 50 a year. How on earth are you getting through two books a week? What sort of books are these? I confess I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy that are between 500 and 800 pages each. That’s not all of my reading, but I’d say at least 50% is.

Having all the time the nose in a book is a disfunctional behavior just like being on the phone all the time is disfunctional.

Of course other people are applying the conformity rule and they're pretending that their phone addiction is normal but both behavior are disfunctional.

However there are still people that are able to function normally and they do whatever they are doing being present to their activity and to the things around them, for example noticing people, speaking to them, greeting them, listening to them etcetera.

I too love reading but I know recognize that there is a moment to read and have pleasure and moments we need to do something else and take pleasure just in the activity we are doing, even if it is just eating or washing the dishes. It also important to accord our attention to people around us and that will give us joy as well.

Don't get defensive saying: you too has a problem, mind your business. Life your life fully being present in each moment and do not try to seek the "pleasure" at every moment, otherwise a book addiction is not any different than a phone addiction.

I’m 65. I’m pretty sure I heard plenty of snide “nose buried in a book” cracks when i was growing up.

Well it’s just cope. It’s the same way in the UK where drinkers will sneer at non drinkers, or meat eaters at vegans. You will get criticised for losing weight or making dietary changes. People imagine that someone else may feel superior to them for making better choices, and they absolutely hate this.

This is true, to an extent, but one missing variable is peers, and the — sometimes outsized — influence they have relative to parents.

Some parents limit screen time and delay giving their children phones, but if their peers all have phones and spend much of their time on screens, the parents’ influence may lose out.

In your example, if the friends that came over pulled out their phones and spent most of their time on the phones, the others would eventually follow suit.

And, of course, the reverse is often true — if friends are sitting around talking/interacting, it can sometimes get the others off their screens.

But I’ve also seen many cases, unfortunately, where this wasn’t the case — even though many are interacting, they’ll still keep their face in their screen.

This is often true in adults, too.

Did you ask them how much they read as ebooks? Libby is very popular.

One thing that helped in our house was making books unavoidable. We keep paperbacks lying around in every room. It sounds silly, but there’s a kind of “cover gravity” and guilt that pulls the kids ( and me) back into a book when a book is just sitting there gathering dust.

It's not necessarily that simple. Both I and my wife read, almost every week I read my daughter passages I've come across in my books, we have bookshelves in every room. We read to our younger children and they enjoy being read to.

I told my daughter that when I was her age I liked to read Animorphs, and girls were reading Babysitter's Club. She brought home these books from the school library and... they were graphic novels.

Apparently the school library is stocked with comic books and the kids can just read those instead of real books. And comic books don't have descriptions of scenes, they have almost no internal monologue or exposition, no symbolism or (literary) imagery, they really can't teach reading comprehension.

Nor do they have books in the house. It's a great time to be a book lover because you can accumulate a huge library for next to nothing by harvesting all the stuff people are giving away. But you can go into a house with children these days and see not a single book in sight. It's sad.

Less literature on offer? It seems to me the easiest time in human history to access any information whatsoever, including any and all literature.

The quality of modern literature may well be declining, but the is literally endless reading material everywhere

No, that is the wrong causality. There is a third factor which make both parents and kids not read.

> there is less literature on offer

Huh? When I was growing up we had the newspaper, Readers Digest, and maybe a library book at home to read (out side of school books). Now I have access to pretty much anything ever written on my phone. Lack of options is not why people read less.

What's worse is that in many areas kids are not allowed (or can't due to urban design) go out of the house on their own anymore. I would actually prefer my kid being out and getting into some trouble than waste around the house. I live in a walkable neighbourhood where kids seem to be out and about on their own around grade 5, so I hope it works out ok for my daughter.

Education today is broken in general.

Few people have a clue about what education is actually for. How can you possibly educate students well if you don't know the destination? And how can you know the destination if you don't know what it means to be human? To be human entails a destination that is definitive for the species.

Overwhelmingly, education today is a shaped by the logic of consumerism. Consumerism begins with a false anthropology, that of the hedonistic homo economicus.

1. Schools send a strong message, whether explicitly or implicitly, that education is about "getting a job". It's about being able to secure a career. At the very least, it is sold primarily as a ticket out of poverty and a means of moving up the social ladder. In a competitive, hyperindividualistic, and consumerist society, status is measured by consumption, so education is a means to increase your power to consume.

2. How many times have we heard teachers say "knowledge is power"? That's a Baconian turn of phrase that represents a turn in scientific history where understanding and knowledge are subordinated to technical power and control. Understanding nature is here dethroned to make way for dominating nature. "Know-how" for us is more important that knowing the "what" and the "why".

3. The coverage of topics and how they're addressed is often jumbled and incoherent. There is some ordering, sure, but it is usually superficial and sloppy. Its practice is like that of some mysterious and obsolete ritual. Many pedagogues are simply bad.

4. Understanding is not rewarded as much as producing supposedly measurable results. In schools, the ultimate result is the grade. The grading system is inherently competitive and designed to rank people first and foremost in a technocratic fashion under the pretense of objectivity. This has "management science" written all over it.

5. Education fads and attempts to artificially infuse technology into education is motivated by profit and abetted by ignorance. Indeed, education in general is big business. Forget tablets and computers. It suffices to note the rapacious practices of the textbook industry, made worse by the fact that these textbooks are almost invariably terrible from a pedagogical standpoint.

Given the soullessness and mechanical nature of modern education, why should we be surprised by what we observe? (I'm not proposing some kind of squishy curriculum. Much of the "reform" of the last few decades that has received just derision is just as misguided, or even worse.) Just as we can talk about factory farming, we may talk about factory education. Students are numbers. But education occurs through relationships. This must begin with parents, but parents are too busy making ends meet or chasing the next promotion. When families were large, older siblings would pick up the slack.

The primary purpose of education is intellectual and moral freedom. Not hyperindividualist freedom, which is about the satisfaction of appetite and the ability to do whatever you happen to feel like doing. The classical view of freedom, which is the ability to do what is objectively good and the ability to be more fully human. Since human beings are essentially intellectual beings and moral beings, it follows that our greatest and most essential expression of freedom is found in the intellectual and the moral.

PISA does not measure reading for pleasure, it measures reading for factual information. There are questions about reading graphs, figuring out information only indirectly mentioned, that sort of thing. It does not care whether you get emotionally invested in this or that character or story.

Reading for pleasure is only loosely related to that.

LotR is an oldie but goodie! I finally dug it out and read it this past month and it was quite enjoyable. I had tried back in high school but was kind of bored with the frilly language and songs and gave up. But this time around in my 40s, having read lots more books since then and developed a stronger vocabulary and reading stamina (e.g. I've read and enjoyed Stormlight Archive twice, which is 4x the length), it was actually pretty quick and easy, and I regret not having done it earlier. I paid a lot of attention to the journey and all the cardinal directions and feel like my sense of direction improved actually. And I'd always liked the movies but the books are so much better! It feels like a book from a strange almost-on-the-spectrum nerd who also spend time on the front lines in World War 1. I think these days the nerdy authors I like and the people who are grunts in the military are almost distinct circles, so maybe unlikely to get quite the same book in terms of the lore but also the realistic emotional punches.

Beyond that, I just started Captive's War, written by the people behind The Expanse, which I adore, and it's looking similarly good (similar to The Expanse; not LotR. I think it will be hard for things to match LotR for me).

Here are our top ~500 English picture books from Open Library that my kids liked enough that we've read at least twice.

The quality of the scans are usually poor and occasionally pages are missing and many have been removed. It's been great for us.

https://openlibrary.org/people/duiznwudidj/books/want-to-rea...

Presently surprised by the lack of /lit/ meme recommendations like “infinite jest” or “gravities rainbow”.

I’ll throw a fun one in. Anything by De Sade.

I’m always fascinated by the idea that we should push kids to read as much as possible as fast as possible. Reading is a deeply subversive activity. Give the kid a copy of something like “the pedogogy of the oppressed” and soon enough you (the teacher) may find your back being put against the wall by the very same kids.

I think people would rather kids don’t read and stay tik tok addicts rather than the school system try to teach 14 year olds about literature through the book Lolita (and yes this does happen in public high schools all across the USA).

Really loved The Hyperion Cantos and The Forever War.

For a shorter classic I found Robur the Conqueror highly entertaining.

This is something i actually found chatgpt useful for. I gave it a list of books ive read and why i liked them, it gave me a list, some minimal summaries. I went and did some searches, read the back, told chatgpt my thoughts and it refined the list once more.

It was able to turn me to an author of a number of scifi books that really piqued my interest. One of them it prefaced with "dont read tue summaries" which i thought strange, but i listend, and ultimately bought the book just from reading a single line summary of it.

This is a good sub for discussing sci-fi and finding recs. https://www.reddit.com/r/printSF/

I read the Wheel of Time series. It's all I read. It took about 18 months. It's great, though. I'm sad it's over, and I'm going to miss the characters.

Kings of the Wyld is a lot of fun. Plus it’s always refreshing to have a middle-aged protagonist instead of a teen or young adult.

Just did the bobiverse series after furiously consuming all the dungeon crawler carl and now I am starting Red Rising.

I love history and biography. Robert Caro' biography of LBJ. I also loved Don Quixote. The Iliad.

Legacy Fleet Trilogy

Fun easy read, Sourdough / 24 hr library (Robin Sloan)

Ubik is one of my faves

Another idea for you - search for "booktube" on youtube. Plenty of recommendations!

Many people worry about children not reading enough but when you look at the parents they're all on their phones.

Monkey see monkey do. If you want kids to read habitually then you need to read habitually.

> parents could be heard telling their kids 'don't stay up too late reading', as if it could be a problem. F

Having lived on this planet for a while now, I am under the impression that anything non-adults do always is a problem, no matter what it is.

Possibly (probably?) a coincidence, but it did look like broad changes to how reading was taught started to land in 2010-2012: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/common-standards-dr...

The real culprit is probably more in line with far more alternatives to reading for entertainment.

Instagram/Android was 2012. (Instagram iOS was late 2010). But not just Instagram; 2012 was about the time that social media really started adopting the dark patterns.

The mayan calendar ended/started a new. So apparently the doomsday did happen, we just did not really notice while being distracted with our new gadgets ...

So you need to look at complete data. This will give you that: https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/ltt/2025/reading/scores-pe...

What you see is that before the anomaly year that was 2020, the scores were slightly lower as compared to 2012, but they were still not as low as early 2000s or before.

Another thing to notice is that the higher percentile performance largely remains flat but lower percentiles seem to be suffering from a drop.

While social media and phones could be a part of it, if they were the only factors, we wouldn’t see such a disparity between different percentiles. I suspect educational policy. No Child Left Behind (NCLB), no matter how controversial, coincided with the improvements in the scores. In 2012, a bunch of states were allowed to have more flexibility from NCLB. In 2015, it was replaced with Every Student Succeeds Act which allowed states to set their own standards. I think this was the single biggest contributor to the declining scores.

Kinda, the measurement points are 2012 and 2020, so the decline is somewhere in that eight year period (birth years 1999-2007 and 2003-2011). My guess is phones/tablets strike again.

My guess is smartphones hitting a point of increased adoption. In the "good old days", phone games were honest and not addiction-inducing adware..

Late December 2010 was the last release of a Harry Potter movie, cutting off the movie -> book pipeline.

Anecdotally, 2012 is when I got back in to reading for pleasure, as a 16-year-old. I had no friends though, and thought someone cute might see me reading and become interested in me.

Prior to that, I stopped reading because video games were easy to get lost in endlessly. At the time, I recall I was probably playing a lot of League of Legends, TF2, Minecraft, and probably some others -- all of which I felt I could pretty much sink an infinite amount of time into, at the time.

This isn’t a bad thing? Kids nowadays have the attention span of puppies. It’s been shown extensively that doomscrolling, switching context every 30s isn’t good for the brain.

Books were already losing the fight on road trips once the gameboy came out - I can't imagine what having every movie, tv show, and song in a flashing touchscreen connected to the internet, why would I pick up a book that takes so much work to deliver fun when I can play AstroBlasters and watch tiktoks of war crimes

It’s absolutely a bad thing, and there’s extensive research demonstrating it

My kids a bit young for reading HP on their own, but it’s our bedtime book series every night. Over the past year or so we’ve (I’ve) read HP before bed. We just started book the Order of the Phoenix.

Our school system has a reading log system (mandatory 15min/night), but I don’t think it’s very effective.

I don’t know that I’d put my kid down as an avid reader, but for his age range I can set him on a task to read and he’ll find something he enjoys enough to be immersed (albeit usually graphic novels akin to Minecraft, Godzilla and other mangas). But at 8 I’d rather that than an aversion to reading.

Anyway, I’m curious about the statistics around parents reading by example (solo), parents reading to children (bedtime or otherwise and until what age). I have memories of my mom reading with me when I was about his age.

I can say this, me and every other parent in my school district is sick of screen time.

This is a link to reading test scores. Maybe reading test scores can stay stable while actual reading declines. I don't think situation is fine.

Thanks now I'm imagining HN as an endless torrent of TikTok videos, where it's an AI voice reading the comments.

I don't know if kids are even reading comments. There's another perfectly good video with just a quick swipe.

I recall enjoying books so much i would skip homework and read, regardless of feeling overloaded or not

Kids would even read in class and get their novels confiscated for the hour

If I watched training videos all day at work, I don't think that would diminish my enjoyment of netflix

for pleasure?

How do books equal sterile environment?

Quality of what's produced in that medium might be one thing. People reading for pleasure are usually reading works published by authors that have gone through some sort of filtering process for quality. Sure, it might be "trashy" novels relative to literature, but at least there's a floor to the quality level or else it just doesn't get published.

But with the advent of other forms of media, more easily produced and consumed, the quality of what is being consumed is lower than the quality of pleasure reading. Combine that with the firehose rate at which it's being consumed and pleasure reading seems better than it might once have.

Because it is exercise for the imaginative mind. Reading can force a reader to build worlds. Some readers are good at this, others need practice. To call reading “consumptive” is severely minimizing literature’s impact on communication throughout human history.

Even looking back at my mother reading Stephen King and romance novels … her reading undoubtedly shaped her and helped her understand the world and her experiences within it.

Note: this comment written from the bathtub after putting down “The Stand” by Stephen King, you know, one of those “little value” books.

Reading connotes all sorts of hard-to-measure advantages and growth that nothing else even comes close to. And while there are works that are better and worse, no matter how lowly the thing is that is being read, that growth still accrues. You could have a child who read nothing but cereal boxes and truck stop restroom graffiti, and he'll be ahead of his classmates on every single thing you can score.

It's not the work, but the medium. Bad dimestore romance novels are therefor superior to someone watching one of those drivel tiktok soap opera things (no idea what they're called). The audio book might be the exact same story as the paperback, but the effect is not equivalent.

*proceeds to shake fist at table.

"Damn you four legged abomination; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee"

I read books on my phone.

And big pictures. Oh wait, I think those are called comics. And the really short ones are children picture books. You know, because small children don't have the concentration to focus on longer stories.

That difference is like comparing taking a piss and having sex. While you use the same body part the experiences are not at all alike.

This is why I prefer audibooks piped through my whole house sonos. It allows me to consume long form while walking around the house completing various projects. Reading isn't a chore, but the thing I engage in while doing chores.

You are not. It's infuriating to the point I've used Gemini to make a readable summary of a video, which works pretty well since they have better access to all the video data/metadata than OpenAI/Anthropic.

> Question: do you think reading is fundamentally worthwhile in terms of practicality, or is there some other medium that would achieve both pleasure and better information retention?

If your quality bar is 'better information retention' then reading is going to be hard to beat. Videos/podcasts don't measure up.

'pleasure' is hard to measure, and gets confounded because reading takes more effort than watching a video/listening to a podcast.

> I hope this comment wasn't too off-topic from the main point of "pleasure"

It looks to me far away over there in the "what's my profit in reading" direction I'm afraid.

I used to read a ton of fiction as a kid, and continued into my late 30s. My reading for pleasure has dropped precipitously of late though, in large part because it gives less dopamine than other things I can do that also make the "productivity" centers of my brain light up. I still read a lot, but it's skewed towards geopolitics, economics and analyses, and most if it is short-form.

I think writing is needed to learn how to organize and express complex chains of thoughts. And to learn how to write well, you need to know how to read critically, too. It goes hand in hand. The same skills you apply to the words of others you can apply to your own, if you have them.

It is completely off in the opposite direction

imho its the screen vs no screen that is the problem. Its better to have one thing for a task . for example one notebook one alarm one instrument one book etc. Our brain aint made to have so many thing cramped in one device. I think when i open a screen my brain sees all the functions of the device and cant focus well. But if I read a book my brain knowes this is the book about this and that and nothing else.