Do you live in Notification Nation? We all do, according to the Reading Agency, whose research shows that 66% of us feel that we’d spend more time reading if we spent less time scrolling. I have to say, I don’t. My emails, Twitter chitchat and WhatsApp conspiracies all finish around 6pm. After that, I’m scrolling for nothing, prowling, pacing, longing for a notification. This is no condition in which to lose yourself in a book, the no-man’s land between ending an online skirmish and waiting for box set hour. (Which, since you ask, is 9pm.)
Ah yes, box sets. Like the other bookend to our collective shelf of failure, the sheer proliferation of good telly has collapsed the final 40 minutes of the day. This used to be when you might reconnect with a partner by bitching about friends, or clear the hump of pages 70 to 100, where the set-up section had become long-winded, and the interesting stuff yet to happen. Now, it’s a 30-second dilemma: pass out or watch one more? I can’t even remember the last time I really properly destroyed anyone’s character, or found out who was still alive at the end of a Timothy Mo.
The peculiar thing about modern life is that nobody’s trying very hard to defend themselves. Back in the day, a failure of self-improvement would be followed by swift self-justification: I cannot go to the gym because I don’t have time. It’s hard to eat healthily when you’re on the road (whatever that means, for anyone who isn’t in a band). Now we have surrendered to our own shortcomings. That Reading Agency survey comes with case studies: Lydia, 24, who knows that the two hours she spends on social media are a “time vacuum”; and Bella, 15, who “would love to spend more time reading and expanding her knowledge”, but unfortunately puts in a four-hour shift checking social media, and any more close looking at stuff with her eyes is just not viable.
Come on, people, we’ve completely rolled over. We’re not even pretending this is anyone’s fault but our own. Book people recommend setting oneself a chapter-a-day challenge, like we’re all bloody eight-year-olds, but I suggest something more empowering: blame someone else.
It is Mark Zuckerberg’s fault. He doesn’t want you to dive head first into literature; nobody ever broke off from reading War and Peace to impulse buy a new nest of saucepans. That’s why he has built an entire empire around alerting you to the fact that an acquaintance is celebrating their birthday. And it is Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings’s fault, for getting the streaming giant out of that patchy start, when for a few years all you could find was a film that was a bit like the one you wanted to watch. Now, they have driven standards too high; some TV is so good that I’m not even sure it is morally inferior to reading, especially when the book I am currently not finishing is Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which is nothing like as good as Netflix’s Russian Doll.
The problem, essentially, is the discovery that people will watch 100-plus hours of character development. Clearly, not all of it is perfect, but the old dichotomy between reading and watching – that one is active, the other passive, that one extends our understanding of the human condition, while the other goes well with Doritos, has melted away. We’re left in a confusing twilight, where we never quite know whether we’re being improved or, still less, improving ourselves. Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper: these people are not your fault.
Finally, blame all other people. If drama is conflict, and any amount of conflict, however trivial, is engaging in some elemental way, then our adaptive social media personalities – in which we will all stop in our tracks to pick a fight with a stranger who may or may not even be real – are far, far more interesting to spectate than human characters as they are revealed in literature – self-questioning, uncertain, compromised, vulnerable. Social media allows an emptier kind of spectatorship, of course, but there’s nothing you can really do. It’s probably a Darwinian thing, and our most successful ancestors got that way because they always knew where there were two lions who had beef.
Anyway, this is the way to do your chapter a day: think of yourself as sticking it to the man. When you’re your own worst enemy, that’s not very motivating.
