The Decline of the Novel
Why reading makes the world a better place
The most common colors of wall paint are Millennial Grey and Landlord White.
People decorate their houses with slop ‘art’ grabbed off the shelves of the TJ Maxx Home Goods section rather than paintings from artists carefully selected from galleries.
Movies are now things you watch to see sex scenes and explosions (and that’s when you’re lucky enough to not be preached to) rather than works of art with great storytelling.
Movies in the 90s and early 00s were bittersweet and full of human emotion. Now they’re dull and uninspired, something to glance at from time to time while you’re busy scrolling on your phone. The writing feels AI-generated, and the truly sad thing is you know it isn’t.
The world has become bland and soulless.
Is it any wonder that no one cares about reading novels any more?
The driving force of modern culture is efficiency, practicality, and the satisfaction of base human impulses rather than depth and appreciation for craftsmanship.
Aesthetics are an afterthought at best.
That’s when they aren’t being outright vilified being vain and pretentious.
The aesthetic emotions are some of the most profound feelings a human can experience, and most people these days never get the opportunity to feel them at all.
Reading a novel requires intentionality.
You have to set aside time, a lot of it. You have to sit in silence with the words. You have to focus and forget about your day-to-day life, at least for a little while.
It requires effort, but the rewards are immense.
Being absorbed in a book is one of the greatest feelings a human being can ever experience.
When you finally set the book down the world around you not just feels but actually looks different, even though everything is exactly the same.
Reading the right book at the right time in your life can completely change the way you view the world.
An aesthetic layer to reality reveals itself. Things that seemed mundane now feel profound.
The way the wind rustles through the leaves on a cold autumn day, the sound and smell of coffee brewing in the morning, the feel of a page turning.
It all carries a new found depth and profundity that wasn’t there before.
That’s the power of absorbing yourself in literature.
And it’s what everyone is missing these days by defaulting to the mundane and worshipping practicality as the supreme value par excellence.
We’ve all met people who boast that they “only read nonfiction”; as if novels are a frivolity only enjoyed by nonserious people.
It’s hard to break that way of thinking.
The benefits of reading fiction are intangible.
Fiction makes you a better person. Not in the practical, measurable, tangible sense of doing good works that can be tallied and analyzed but in the Nietzschean sense of becoming more in tune with the higher level human emotions.
You enter an elevated state of consciousness that frees your mind from the tyranny of myopic thinking.
You start to view other people as fully-fledged humans with depth to them instead of one dimensional objects/obstacles who exist to either serve a function or get in your way. You become aware of the deep sadness that most people live with. You come to understand that that sadness is the root cause of The Way They Are. People aren’t evil, they’re just broken. The negative traits and behaviors that used to enrage or annoy you now cause you to feel compassion and empathy instead.
The End.
If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.