Carl Hendrick wrote a Substack post titled The Humility of the Page: The Lost Ethics of Deep Reading (May 29, 2025).
« There was a time, and not that long ago, when reading was seen not simply as an academic exercise or leisure activity, but as a moral act. To pick up a book was to willingly submit to another’s voice, another’s mind, another’s world. It was, in its quiet way, a gesture of humility. »
« Looking back now I can see that what was happening: I was becoming unmoored from myself and the narrow orbit of my own concerns. The boundaries of my moral imagination were being stretched, gently but insistently, by voices far wiser and more complex than my own and I became a better person for it. The endeavour was transformative. To inhabit unfamiliar minds, to wrestle with conflicting ideas, to sit with discomfort rather than resolve it prematurely got me out of myself and fostered a kind of humility, a recognition that my instincts were not final. »
« Much of the internet wants us to dwell in shallow, curated versions of our own minds…We become trapped in a hall of increasingly vacuous mirrors »
« What cannot be captured in a headline, summarised in a swipeable carousel, or condensed into an extractable quote risks being ignored altogether. »
« But moral life, like literature, does not lend itself to compression. Moral life is ambiguous, contradictory, unresolved. It resists the efficiencies of the feed. A Tolstoy novel is not a tweetstorm. »
« This is not just a private loss. It is a civic one. Without the capacity to dwell in difference, to engage with arguments we do not agree with, or to follow a thread longer than 280 characters, we become intellectually and morally brittle. We lose the very qualities that democratic life depends upon: empathy, nuance, deliberation. »
« Reading, in the end, is an act of faith. Faith that other minds matter, that complexity deserves our patience, that truth emerges not from confirmation but from confrontation with difference. »
« We are being trained, not explicitly, but implicitly, to treat words as units of utility. Optimised, shortened, and surfaced by platforms whose guiding logic is not comprehension, but click-through. »
« To read deeply is to insist that some things, wisdom, empathy, the expansion of human understanding, cannot be optimised, only experienced. »
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