Many articles are now discussing the decline in reading among the younger generation. Half of adults in the UK rarely pick up a book for pleasure. Reading is in decline in the US even in literature programs.

Talking to professors in Europe, you get the sense that it’s harder to motivate students to engage with education materials.

In my own experience, I’ve seen students struggle to read books they’re assigned in class. Their response: I prefer to read a summary.

The end of reading has correlated with a decline of empathy, an inability to communicate across political lines and a collapse of a feeling of community in the west. These trends are interlinked and I believe the same thing.

When we read, we open ourselves up to the lives of other people. We learn to step outside ourselves. We confront the great ideas of history, good and evil, man vs god, man vs machine.

We learn that cultures across the world have different practices, while simultaneously sharing the same emotional core. In Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, the Jewish character asks: if you cut me do I not bleed? Meaning, are we not all fundamentally, at the heart of it, all the same?

In the absence of reading we have algorithmic content. Personalised. Commercial. Built for insecurities and anger. Rage.

What feeds the algorithm is rage and division, but what feeds us as human beings is realising how small we are in the scale of the universe, how our rage and anger at some online video means nothing in the scope of human existence, how there is more to life than what is right in front of us.

This confrontation with life itself can only occur outside of the narrow confines of personalisation. We only find ourselves when we are lost, in the woods, in the world, in a book, in a new city or place.