Many think the problem with reading is that it is boring, or that it demands too much discipline, and that ordinary people across generations have always found it difficult to sustain. The general belief, spoken or unspoken, is that reading is for a select few, for the intellectuals, or the pseudo-intellectuals who want to position themselves as better than everyone else. And for that very reason, some people fight against the very idea that reading works, that it transforms, that it is one of the most effective and affordable tools for human development that has ever existed.
You see it in how society reacts when someone says they read 150 books in a year. Or 10 books in a month. The majority rush to water it down. They cast aspersions, make derisive comments, and perform a kind of public shaming that makes you wonder if reading has quietly become the new crime.
Just recently, a woman posted on X about reading 50+ books in six months. The response was telling. Someone told her she must be jobless (because apparently, employed people don't read. Lol!) Another comment, the one that stopped me cold, read something like: "I would rather step out and take action and become great myself than read about the action of great men." That comment received over 16,000 likes and 800 reposts. Sixteen thousand people agreed with that statement. Sixteen thousand people didn't see how deeply they had missed the point.
It made me question what is happening to us. Why are there seemingly more people averse to reading as a tool for transformation than there are people who see it as one?
I think I found the answer.
The Path of Least Resistance
We live in a world engineered for distraction. Short-form content, infinite scroll, algorithmic dopamine, all of it designed to keep you consuming rather than thinking.
According to a Microsoft study, the average human attention span has dropped from 12 seconds in 2000 to approximately 8 seconds today, driven almost entirely by digital consumption habits. Researchers at the University of California found that after a digital interruption such as a notification, a quick scroll, a reflexive phone check, it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully regain deep focus. Twenty-three minutes. For one interruption.
This is the world in which we are asking people to sit still, pace slowly, and go through the pages of a book. This is the world in which reading has to compete. So I am not surprised that people aren't reading. I am not even surprised that they are mocking the ones who do. What I am saying is that this makes reading — real, sustained, intentional reading — one of the most powerful differentiators available to any person alive today. Not in spite of the noise. Because of it.
People forget that every time someone chooses to read, they are choosing discipline over instant pleasure. They are choosing knowledge expansion over consumption. They are actively growing the muscle of focus in a world designed to destroy it. That is not a small thing. In a world of 8-second attention spans, the person who can sit with a book for an hour is building a cognitive superpower that compounds quietly and devastatingly over time.
Readers should not be mocked. They should be feared.
And perhaps, if we are honest, they are. The mockery on social media might not be contempt. It might be something closer to envy dressed up as ridicule. Psychologists describe a phenomenon called Actively Open-minded Thinking Resistance. It is the tendency to respond to displays of intellectual effort with social mockery as a defensive mechanism. It is far easier to belittle a reader's habit than to examine why you have not built one.
What a Book Actually Does to You
The first time I picked up a book, a real, transformational book, I didn't fully understand it. I wondered why people read things like this. It felt slow, dense, and far removed from anything immediately useful.
Then something strange happened. Weeks later, ideas from that book began showing up in my conversations. Vocabulary I hadn't consciously memorised started surfacing naturally. I found myself thinking differently about situations I would have previously reacted to without reflection. I was, quietly, becoming a better thinker.
And that was only one book. So I thought: if one book could do this, what would five do? Ten? Twenty?
That question is what my entire transformation story summaries to. And the answer, I have found, is that the effect compounds. Every book adds to a growing architecture of thought, reference, empathy, and perspective that reshapes how you see the world and how you move through it.
Pew Research has found that people who read regularly, even just one book per year, are significantly more likely to hold leadership positions, earn above-average incomes, and report higher levels of life satisfaction. The average executive, survey after survey tells us, reads four to five books per month. This is not a coincidence. This is infrastructure.
Reading Has Always Been Hard. That Is the Point
I will be honest. Even now, reading is hard for me. Not because the books are difficult, but because the world we live in makes sustained attention feel like swimming upstream. Every device in your pocket is engineered by teams of some of the smartest people on earth to steal your focus and hold it. Let's face it. TikTok, X, Instagram are not neutral platforms. They are attention extraction machines. And they are very, very good at their job.
So yes, reading is hard. It has always required discipline. But it is harder now than it has ever been, which means the gap between those who read and those who don't is wider now than it has ever been. And wider gaps mean bigger advantages.
I almost stopped. I will not pretend otherwise. There was a season when I felt my reading discipline slipping, when the pull of the scroll was winning, when I could feel the habit loosening.
Then I thought: what if I found someone to share this with? What if I didn't have to do it alone? That thought is what became Emprinte Readers Hub.
Community Is the Missing Infrastructure
Research by Dr. BJ Fogg at Stanford's Behaviour Design Lab has consistently shown that social accountability is one of the most powerful drivers of habit formation. I read of his work in James Clear's Atomic Habits, and it demonstrates that humans are dramatically more likely to sustain a behaviour when embedded in a community that practises and celebrates it. We are not built for isolated discipline. We are built for shared purpose.
This is what Emprinte is. We are not a book club or just another reading group. We are a community that makes reading sustainable by making it shared. At Emprinte, we design accountability that replaces willpower, we hold conversations that deepen comprehension, and we make our reading habit an identity.
Because here is what I have learned: the hardest part of reading is not the book. It is the consistency. And consistency, in a distracted world, is a social problem as much as it is a personal one.
The World Is Not Reading. That Is Your Opportunity
The data is clear. Attention spans are shrinking. Reading time is declining. Digital noise is increasing. And yet the human need for depth, for wisdom, for the kind of thinking that only sustained reading produces, that need is not going anywhere. The world needs more of it, not less.
You see, in a world where nobody is reading, the very few who choose to read will lead. Not because readers are superior. But because the habits of mind that reading builds, things like focus, empathy, critical thinking, the ability to handle complexity in a polarized world as this, are becoming rarer precisely as they are becoming more essential.
The person who reads is quietly becoming someone the non-reader cannot compete with. Eventually and inevitably.
Whether you are an established reader, an inconsistent one, or someone who has never picked up a transformational book in their life, the invitation is the same. Start. Or start again. And find a community that will hold you to it.
The few who choose to read will lead.
Will you be among them?