§1. You get the best thoughts from someone's life, unlike social media which floods your mind with garbage, inconsequential thoughts (which moreover are designed to outrage you and thus further distract you!)
§2. Books provide a unity and closure in someone's work, unlike movies with their endless sequels or reboots, or video games which try to make you play as much as possible. Putting a good book down after finishing it and reflecting on it is a great experience, in contrast to the frustration of seeing your favorite TV show decline over the years due to the producers milking it as long as possible, or your favorite manga never getting finished or getting axed.
§3. Books are far less commercial than other mediums because they are far cheaper to make, and (at least the great books of the past) were made by people interested in ideas and in life, rather than fame or building an audience they can make money from.
§4. Books, unlike mere essays or blog posts, can provide an in-depth exploration of a subject or an idea, and all of its main consequences. There is only so much you can say in a single essay, which is why the best essayists are also those who are great at writing fully fledged books, but those who can only write shorter pieces remain fairly pedestrian in their thoughts, because they never take any matter to the roots, which often requires a full-on book to expand upon and connect to other subjects.
§5. Books thus go against the modern trends that have eroded people's attention spans and ability to think. To read well one must read slowly, which thus invites one to live life more slowly, which is without exaggeration a radically transformative thing to do in our times. Living more slowly makes you focus on more important matters, because you have the time and space to reflect on what is truly important to you 1. It also makes you appreciate the little things far more, because feeling requires you to slow down; someone who is perpetually busy cannot appreciate anything.
§1. Authors of older books are less likely to be repeating the dogma of their era, and to the extent that they do, we now have the distance to see their assumptions more transparently. Contemporary "writers" on the other hand are overwhelmingly commentators of current events, which in a few decades no one will care about. The older books that we remember to this day are those that have passed the test of time, which means that they write about more important subject matters than the current election. 2
§2. Getting in the minds of people of the past helps us see our own assumptions and circumstances more clearly, and helps us develop mental flexibility. It is no secret that social media has greatly reinforced the dynamics of echo chambers and tribalism, due to the fact that their feeds change based on what we interact with, and the fact that outrage makes people interact far more than thoughtful discussions do.
§3. It was harder to get published in the past, which forced writers to focus all of their attention on the most important matters. A good writer is not just one that knows what to say, but also not what to say. In this regard, contemporary writers talk about everything under the sun but bring nothing of substance to any conversation, they write in order to get paid and not because they have something to say, as Schopenhauer notes. 3
§1. No possibilities of distractions, physical books force you to focus on only thing at a time.
§2. Paper doesn't hurt your eyes over long periods of time, unlike screens.
§3. Taking notes directly in the book that you are reading is so much more convenient, it makes you more engaged in what you are reading, and in my experience, makes the subject matter more ingrained in your mind. I myself rely a lot on spatial positioning to remember things, and the spatial configuration of my notes helps a lot with knowing immediately what they are about.
§4. LLMs have the serious potential to rewrite much of what we read, potentially to make everything more friendly to the current system and the ruling classes. Even if this specific worry won't happen, the fact that modern writers rely on the outputs of LLMs, which are themselves fed on the most prevalent (and thus most system-friendly) "ideas" of our times, means that writing on the internet is converging to an incestuous, centralized set of the same ideas. The "AIs" might or might not pose a threat to people, but it is the fact that people are becoming more LLM-like which is the far greater problem, because it's already been happening for several decades now, a trend which has started with the mass democratization of TVs.
Regardless, being less reliant on screens, and outsourcing our life and thinking away from the system is always a good move, in our times of societal decline and generalized propaganda. Remember that in Orwell's 1984, keeping a simple journal was a criminal act, and for good reasons: independent thinking is genuinely dangerous to any established order.
The tragedy of social media is that while it has allowed everyone to become a writer in a sense, it has flooded the internet with human slop, and created an environment where the ones with the largest audiences are also those who have nothing of substance to say. They are popular because they are relatable, rather than perceptive and interesting people. This is the fundamental problem with mass democracy: let the average person stir what is made, and everything falls down to the lowest common denominator. The modern world tries to convince us that removing all friction and all barriers whatsoever is a universal good, but clearly we can see that it isn't always the case, though of course mass literacy for instance certainly did mankind some good at its time.
Any intelligent person can see all of this clearly, and has enough good sense to get out of those mediocre environments, rather than endlessly complain about them. I can't think of a bigger sign of mediocrity nowadays than spending much of one's time on social media or on one's phone. Physical books will genuinely change your life, especially if you read great ones. Take your life seriously and make the change now, you will regret not having done so earlier.
1 Incidentally during Covid, lots of people realized, thanks to their free time from the lockdowns, that they weren't living the life they truly wanted. Whether they did anything in response to such a realization is something else, but it shows how little is needed for someone to start breaking out of their habitual momentum.
2 Which hardly matters in the grand scheme of things, because the technological system remains the same, whether the left or the right wins an election.
3 Schopenhauer, On writing.
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Reading Attention Technosystem Democracy
2026-09-18