The Informational Onslaught: Why I Can't Read Like I Used To

Each DAY we consume the same amount of information that a highly-educated person would consume in an entire LIFETIME, just 500 years ago.

Have been feeling a hell of a lot of informational overload lately. This short piece from Alex De Lagarde provides context for why this makes a hell of a lot of sense, and why Non Grata is so intent on print.

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Nobody reads anymore. Or, to put it more accurately, nobody reads like they used to.

Well, except for you, of course.

This should not come as a surprise to those of us living through the late-stage evolutions of the Information Age. We have all bore witness to the rise of epochal technologies like the iPhone and the social media platforms that followed suit, which have drastically altered our information consumption habits. In an age where the static, written word must compete with AI-powered, auto-scrolling algorithms and stimulating short-form video content, the former loses. Badly.

Over the last twenty years there has been a 42% drop in the number of those who read for pleasure daily, according to an analysis of the American Time Use Survey.¹ When paired with the fact that 19% of American adults were responsible for 82% of the country’s reading, the picture becomes stark.² There are myriad theories as to why people are reading less: An individual preference for low-friction media, lowered cultural importance on intellectuality, laziness. The usual suspects. All valid, yet missing a critical component. There are deeper factors at play.

Seldom discussed is the startling, near exponential increase in the average person’s daily informational intake. At present, we consume an average of 74 gigabytes of information per day through the use of computers, cell-phones, tablets, and other technologies. This is the same amount of information that a highly educated individual would consume in an entire lifetime just 500 years ago.³ In the past, there were real constraints around how much information one could absorb. Information was scarce. Readers engaged with works over longer periods of time. The language had time to settle into the mind of the reader, helping shape their internal standards for the written word. Contrast this with our time: the age of information abundance. Information is cheap now, and we take it wherever we can get it. Our language habits reflect this shift: the quality of our words, thoughts, and ideas has fallen off a cliff. The human brain is adaptable, but a jump this substantial leads to an evolutionary mismatch, resulting in what some researchers are calling “the capacity challenge.”

Our brains evolved to efficiently process limited sets of relevant data and, as expected, run into difficulties when faced with seemingly unlimited amounts of irrelevant information. This is one of the main reasons we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of mental health issues over the last decade.⁴ We are not machines, we are biological beings with finite stores of attention and linguistic processing capabilities. Yet, the world we live in is designed to bombard us with nearly infinite input, overloading our brains as a result.

The informational onslaught begins every morning with an iPhone-assisted awakening, followed by a carousel of stimulation. Consider a typical workday: You’ve responded to forty-seven emails, toggled between eight browser tabs for a single task, and spent your commute home absorbing a podcast at 1.5x speed. By evening, when it is finally time to relax, the prospect of sitting with a challenging novel feels less like leisure and more like another demand on an already depleted system. You’ve waited for this moment all day, yet can’t bring yourself to open up War and Peace, opting to reach for the remote instead. After a day of your attention being scattered, your brain is burnt, leaving you less likely to slow down, sit still, and silently read the book you said you’d finish months ago.

For much of human history, the written word was one of the most potent drugs we had access to. There was a stretch of time when books, magazines, and newspapers were the main medium through which leisure and novelty was had. Lively scenes were conjured out of nothing but ink printed on papyrus, telepathy made possible through the carrier signal of controlled hand movements and ink. It was magic. The transition from agricultural and industrial work being at the core of human society to administrative knowledge work only expedited the downfall of our reading habits. We labored and exhausted our bodies first, minds second. After a long day of physically demanding work, we relished the opportunity to finally focus our mental energy on the words of our favorite authors, resting our bodies and renewing our minds. Now, in the age of bureaucratic knowledge work, we spend most of our time exhausting our thinking minds. At the end of a workday, our mind has processed exponentially more bits of data than our ancestors did when working in fields and factories. The pace of life has sped up, the stimulation levels have multiplied, all while our brains have remained the same as they were before.

If we wish to have the requisite amount of energy needed to fully engage with a piece of text, we need to create space in other areas of our day. In creating space for our minds, we allow our energy, our attention, to remain stored for when we need to call on it the most. We must, on an individual level, decide to unshackle ourselves while we still hold the key: choosing high-friction activities like reading, reducing unnecessary information intake by learning to be bored again, and deleting the most damaging of the short-form social media apps.

Personally, I’ve struggled with this, as these apps often double as a way to stay in parasocial contact with friends and family, something that feels necessary in our increasingly isolated world. Yet this cheapening of human-to-human socialization is but another reason to free ourselves from these algorithmic grips. These applications are not suitable replacements for the social contact and creative input that we need most. I have rid the most damaging of the apps from my phone to avoid temptation, making mindful efforts to interact with the people and ideas I value most. Our minds are in the process of being depleted and commodified by technological innovations led by corporations who have made their intentions clear: profiting off of our valuable time and attention. Our brains are being digitally drained of the ability to sit in silent stillness, which is why choosing to sit with a book is liberating in a world tailored for stimulation.

We can choose to lead less digital, information-dense lives by disavowing the digital products whose main aims are to capture and hold our attention. The past can never be again, but that doesn’t mean that we can’t borrow some of their behaviors and lifestyle choices to help us reclaim our minds and our time, the two fundamentals needed to lead a fulfilling life. The future of literature, of educated society, rests in our willingness to reject the lifestyle that is praised as normal today, leaving behind the cheaper, less-fulfilling forms of entertainment in favor of the slower, but richer, mediums of the written word.

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1. Jessica K. Bone et al., “The Decline in Reading for Pleasure over 20 Years of the American Time Use Survey,” iScience 28, no. 9 (2025): 113288, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12496190/

2. David Montgomery, “Most Americans Didn’t Read Many Books in 2025,” YouGov, December 31, 2025, https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53804-most-americans-didnt-read-many-books-in-2025

3. Sabine Heim and Andreas Keil, “Too Much Information, Too Little Time: How the Brain Separates Important from Unimportant Things in Our Fast-Paced Media World,” Frontiers for Young Minds 5:23 (June 1, 2017), https://kids.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frym.2017.00023/

4. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. “Associations Between Screen Time and Lower Psychological Well-Being Among Children and Adolescents: Evidence From a Population-Based Study.” Preventive Medicine Reports 12 (2018): 271–283. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pmedr.2018.10.003