The reading brain, once forged by sustained attention and deep engagement, is now adapting to an environment built for speed, distraction, and artificial fluency. What we are witnessing is not the end of reading, but rather the end of the essential consolations that reading affords us. Reading, but in ultra-processed form.

We live in an age of lexical abundance. More words, more access, more content than at any time in human history. And yet something essential is slipping away. Not reading itself, but the kind of reading that once shaped minds and formed character: slow, immersive, reflective, and richly human. As Harold Bloom noted: “"We read deeply for varied... See more

What we are seeing is not less exposure to text, but a fundamental shift in the nature of that exposure. The immersive arc of narrative is giving way to the skimmable feed. Syntax shortens, attention fractures, the very architecture of thought begins to mimic the medium.