I set a goal to read 50 books. I almost made it, and once I started it was easier than I thought
The digital age is changing us in ways we would never expect. If you had told me 20 years ago that I would one day stop reading books, I would have said you were crazy. I’ve always been a reader; from the time I was little, I would hide away somewhere with a book and devour it, often in one sitting. Cut to 2021, when I realized I had only read five books that year, and the previous year, only eight.
I didn’t have to wonder why. I already knew it was my phone. We see our phone’s own calculation of how many hours we’ve spent on it each day, and we can’t quite believe it. What? Hours, I realized, that I used to spend reading books. So I made a New Year’s resolution for 2022: more books, less phone. I set a goal for myself of fifty books. And I almost made it.
Nancy Jo Sales is a writer at Vanity Fair and the author of American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers and Nothing Personal: My Secret Life in the Dating App Inferno
