Reading is bad for your mind.
I’m dead serious. Think about it: if you spend your life reading thousands of books, scouring the libraries of the world, internalizing every idea, every message, every thought, every story, then who are you? You will live a thousand lives yet none will be yours. Not a single thought in your mind will be original; not a single lesson will be chewed down and internalized, for fear of wasting precious mental space that could hold yet another page. Not a single feeling will be wholly genuine; only borrowed, secondhand, vicarious.
I swear by this unpopular opinion: Reading is better than not reading—unless you could have discovered, on your own, everything the book would have taught, shown, revealed, or made you feel. Sometimes it’s better not to read. The paradox is that without reading, you can’t know what you’re missing, and once you read it, it’s too late to discover it for yourself. That’s why, in principle, reading is better than not.
And yet, this paradox partly explains why some Greek philosophers distrusted writing. The written word is a memory disabler and the natural enemy of thought, reflection, contemplation, and wisdom. The unexamined life is not worth living, as isn’t the life you don’t live at all because you’re too busy peering into the lives of others.
I love reading.
Strange how such a mundane statement suddenly carries a different weight, isn’t it? But don’t mistake me for an incoherent madman—what I’ve written above is some rhetorical prolepsis layered with antiphrasis so I can now safely say that I like books and that reading is actually good for you without sounding trite for stating the most obvious preference imaginable.
Which isn’t obvious at all. It’s the emotional detachment from novelty and the numbing effect of normalcy that makes it feel that way. That’s why those rhetorical devices work, because I’m forcing you to consider my argument seriously. You can’t dismiss it with a hand wave. There was a time when that “obvious preference” was profoundly controversial.
Just as using AI is today.
Yes, this was about AI all along.
“Oh,” you might scoff, “there you go. Comparing AI to books, the very lifeblood of civilization, the sacred vessel of human genius, the one true beacon of enlightenment!” You’re probably wondering how can I be so shameless to draw such a brazen analogy. Simple. They both make me hungry: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Most things are good in their own right, but nothing is without unwanted trade-offs, neither indulging on your favorite chatbot nor the noble art of turning soft pages into light; each word a toll paid in solitude, each line a slow surrender to the quiet sorcery of thought made eternal.
Every sentence you read occupies a neuron that could have been used to derive it from first principles instead of merely recalling it. The ideas in these paragraphs now reside in your mind. You can no longer discover them; you’ve merely taken them from me. And with that, the satisfaction—and the cognitive reward—of reaching them on your own is lost to you forever. Likewise, every sentence you let AI write for you is one less chance for your weary brain to engage with—to gear into—the task before you, slowly eroding your ability to wrestle with problems using the sharpest tool evolution has been able to come up with.
Lest I accidentally inspire you to set your personal library ablaze, let me be clear—you shouldn’t. Yes, reading is bad for your mind… if you’re a rhapsode from 500 BCE, clinging to the sanctity of oral tradition. Here in 2025, the written word rules the world, and those who refuse to read are, at best, unremarkable. At worst, dead weight. Fast-forward to 3000 CE, future scholars are saying the same thing about you, as the epitome of anti-AI purity.
Both using AI and reading are fine. In the same way that drinking water is fine—do it too much, and you’ll die of hyponatremia. Swallow too many words and you’ll die a wordcel with a severe case of hyperlexic asphyxiation having lived indeed a thousand lives but yours. Bury yourself in AI-generated slop—let ChatGPT ideate, outline, write, and edit your stories, do your research, code, whatever—and you’ll wither your gray matter into an inert 1.3 kg lump. You see, books and AI aren’t so different after all.
A radical thought that solves this existential conundrum once and for all came to me recently in a dream: what if we didn’t overdo it? Perhaps you don’t have to read all day. Perhaps you don’t have to drown in your beverages. Perhaps—I know this is unhinged but hear me out—perhaps you don’t have to rely on AI all the time, for everything.
And just like that, you will be fine.
You can soothe your worries by having faith in people. They are not stupid. They will use their brain even if AI spreads in all directions and for all purposes. The fear that overwhelms you is not a testament to your humanitarian spirit but a sign of condescending distrust.
And now that we’re at it, you should also drop the identitarian baggage holding you back and accept that whereas using AI all the time will make you dumb—I agree—never using it will make you dumber.
So go read a book. Or better yet, ask ChatGPT what he thinks about this.
