Heyo!
Sarah and I just took a long weekend to Nashville, the South’s hub for bachelorette parties.
I haven’t explored the Buckle of the Bible Belt since college, and I wanted to see why so many people moved there during the pandemic.
While Austin and Miami became better at recruiting than Nick Saban, Nashville said (with a country twang), “We’re cool too — and cheaper.”
The city is known for two things I don’t love — country music and hot chicken — but I found it delightful (as long as we stayed off Broadway — blondes with sashes can keep that one).
Sarah and I started the trip with a pit stop at Buc-ee’s.
Then we saw J.R.R. Tolkien’s original fireplace.
And we bought books. A lot of books. (McKay’s is a paradise for thrifty readers.)
For the past three years, I’ve read 80% fiction and 20% nonfiction.
The ratios were reversed pre-pandemic.
I usually felt guilty for reading fiction because I thought it wasn’t the best use of time.
Why read a book about a man stuck in a hotel when you can read one that helps you form better habits?
Wouldn’t it be better to spend 10 hours this month learning from Steve Jobs than reading about a fake family’s story during the Great Depression?
Valid questions.
But Covid led me to ask different questions.
Now I believe reading fiction is one of the best daily investments I make.
Here are two reasons why.
Reading fiction is a rebellion against two destructive sides of the American pendulum
In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted we would only work 15 hours a week by 2030.
Even if you’re bullish about AI, this prediction is now laughable.
The belief was that tech would make our work easier, giving us more margin for leisure. But rather than using tech to get time back, we’ve used it to do more work faster.
Our working hours are increasing with tech. Because like any tool, tech reveals character more than changing it. And the US values productivity more than quality of life.
The US is one of six countries that doesn’t require a single day of time off. You haven’t heard of the other five: Palau, Nauru, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, and Micronesia (true Survivor friends have heard of this one).
And the average maternity leave in the US is 10 weeks. Sweden is 69, the UK is 52, and Canada is 50.
One side of the American pendulum is hyperproduction, where overoptimization and efficiency are the gods of choice.
We feel the pressure to measure our days by what we produce.
If one side of the pendulum is hyperproduction, then the other side is gluttony.
Not gluttony like stuffing your face with another bag of Nerd Clusters, although that is part of it, but gluttony in the form of overindulgence of your appetites and desires in general. You can see this most with entertainment.
Entertainment is a wonderful gift, but when consumed beyond moderation, it’s a false prophet of rest. It’s a yielding activity rather than a pleasing or life-giving one.
According to Consumer Affairs, Americans spend 4.5 hours on their mobile phones each day (that’s now 30 minutes more than the amount of time the average American spends watching TV each day).
And nearly 57% of Americans consider themselves 'mobile phone addicts'.
If we’re not addicted to our work, we’re addicted to the consumption of content. I’m guilty of this.
YouTube is the second most visited site in the world, behind Google.
Users collectively watch more than one billion hours of content every day. That’s 114,808 years.
You’re not only what you create. You’re also what you consume.
Gluttony and hyperproduction are two sides of the pendulum. Reading fiction is a rebellion against two of the biggest American idols. It’s a counter-cultural decision to participate in rest. To experience pleasure by receiving rather than producing.
Reading fiction is empathy training
Research has proven time and time again that reading fiction increases our empathy.
Because “a reader lives a thousand lives before he dies.” And each of those lives is different than yours, yet close enough to provide you with glimpses of how humanity works.
I’m convinced you can get 80% of a nonfiction’s main points in the first and last chapter of the book. If not that, then a 10-minute YouTube video will do.
But fiction stretches your empathy muscles because you have to immerse yourself in a world where you’re not the protagonist. And you can’t get there by just reading SparkNotes.
You have to wrestle with the world, characters, and tensions for pages on pages to be absorbed by a story, enjoy it, and learn from it.
Your brain processes fiction as if you’re somewhat experiencing the story yourself. Story can stir your emotions, where you feel with characters. Each page can be a mini-practice of listening and feeling.
And in a time when many of us are drunk on self-help, fiction can encourage you to practice seeing and understanding others who aren’t like yourself.
You can see the world more clearly when you step outside of your reality where you believe you’re the main character.
“Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.” — C.S. Lewis
✌️
— Luke
P.S. Here are some of my favorites from the past week, including two podcasts and one game.
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