High Volume Reading as a Moral Imperative

There’s this extraordinarily silly thing that happens on TikTok every year like clockwork. One batch of users talks about the one- tw0- three- hundred books they read that year. Another batch is utterly baffled at these numbers to the point of conniption. “How is it possible?” is the cry they lift to the heavens. “Don’t these people have a life? I work for a living.” And it drips with condescension and pity or, worse, accusations of falsehood.
But all you have to do is the math.
Say we consider an average reading speed of 200-250 words a minute and a typical book length of 70k-100k words. Using these numbers, you can knock out forty to fifty books just reading an hour a day. Up that to two hours, that’s one-hundred books. Increase that to the four hours that the average person watches television a day, and there are your two-hundred books easy.
Then we start calculating for at-work or commute audio-book listening. For jobs or care-giving roles with a lot of downtime. Account for shorter books and faster readers, and we’re not looking at am impossible calculus.
If we establish that the numbers work out, then what’s the problem?
There’s still a level of incredulity that this can’t be possible. That there simply isn’t enough time in any given day.
Then a high-volume reader will lay out their week. It will include five hours of reading on a Saturday.
“Well, I don’t want to do that. I hang out with my friends all day Saturday.”
“Okay, then you have a slightly different set of priorities.”
And oh. That’s where it all starts to break down.
It should be a very neutral statement. A person with kids has a set a different set of priorities than someone without. Maybe you prioritize seeing action movies in the theater over comedies because tickets are expensive and those are the types of movies that are best on a larger screen. We make these little sorting choices all the time.
And sometimes you’re in a situation where your priorities are stacked for you. You can’t necessarily help job, school, or familial requirements eating into leisure time. But presuming you have any leisure time at all, there’s going to come a moment where the only obstacle is choice. Do you read a few chapters of a book or watch an episode of a television show?
Again, that should be a neutral crossroad. If you want to watch television, watch television. Visual mediums aren’t inherently worse or better than textual one in terms of intelligence or narrative conveyance. But we’ve assigned a moral quality to reading. Books are “better” for you than everything else. And while, obviously, you could make an objective case that reading a book is probably better for you, intellectually, than something like mindlessly scrolling a meme page on Facebook, who says everything we do has to meet this specific standard?
Maybe, some days, it’s better for your mental health to giggle at videos of bunnies flipping over their food dishes. Maybe the part the brain that you want to stretch one night is the part that the does the virtual trigonometry to bounce energy orbs off a wall to heal a critically endangered Spider-Man who will be extremely ungrateful for your efforts.
Yet that element of morality remains.
So if you’ve not deconstructed those assumptions, and you’re looking at a high-volume reader, they may read as “more moral” than you. They’re “better” than you. Which the high-volume reader doesn’t think at all. And when the high-volume reader says you can make the choice to read more, too, it sounds like moral condemnation.
Collectively, we struggle with the idea that we are the arbiters of our own circumstances. Our default state, too often, is that we “can’t do” a thing.
“Oh, I’d love to start writing/drawing/working out/picking up some other skill-set.”
Do it.
“I’d love to make more time to read.”
Then do it.
It’s only when you divorce that moral element, when reading becomes a thing you might choose to do among other things, that you stop thinking about reading as having more value than it does.
Then you actually might make that choice more often, because, suddenly, that pressure’s lessened.