Is Reading Still A Choice? Or Is It Becoming A Necessity?

As a bibliotherapist, I often come across readers and clients who say to me that reading is a luxury, or that reading is simply one choice among the many leisurely activities available to us.

We live in a time that constantly pulls us away from reading: speed, distraction, overstimulation. So I would like to begin with a very direct question: is reading still a choice… or is it becoming a necessity? That’s a really interesting question, and it cuts deeper than it looks. The honest answer is: it's always been both, and the tension between them is getting sharper, and why I am leaning more towards one than the other.

Here's why the question is more interesting than it first appears.

Reading was never purely a choice. Literacy has been a gate to power, employment, and citizenship for centuries. The person who couldn't read a contract, a ballot, or a medicine label wasn't freely opting out. They were locked out. So the "choice" framing has always had class, access, and privilege running underneath it. What's changed is that there is a shift taking place as I write this, and this shift isn't about whether you can opt out of reading, but about what kind of reading is becoming load-bearing in daily life: Information density is rising. The world is more complex, and navigating it (financially, medically, politically) requires parsing longer, more nuanced texts than a street sign or a headline. Misinformation is everywhere, the ability to read critically, to slow down, trace a claim, notice what's missing, is increasingly the difference between being manipulated and not.

Read the rest on my substack.

If you are interested in Bibliotherapy, you might enjoy my book, Bibliotherapy: The Healing Power of Reading or our Online Bibliotherapy Courses.