Nearly everyone over a certain age can recall a specific type of afternoon, but it would be difficult to recreate today. Perhaps a late-summer Saturday or a rainy Sunday in the winter. An open book on a lap. Hours go by without warning. Reading deeply enough to make the room around you temporarily cease to exist—not sleeping or scrolling. It’s more difficult to fall into this emotion these days. The majority of people never even try.
When you look at the numbers, they are subtly concerning. According to research published in the journal iScience, the percentage of Americans who read every day has decreased by roughly 2% annually, and daily reading for pleasure has decreased by about 40% over the previous 20 years. That isn’t an anomaly or a peculiarity between generations. That’s a long-term degradation of what was once the most dependable way for many people to get some rest. The paperback was gradually replaced by the phone in the evening routine, to the point where most people hardly noticed the change.
This specific loss is intriguing because reading and scrolling appear to be similar tasks at first glance. Both require sitting motionless. Both entail gazing at text. However, the cognitive experience is comparable to watching a video of a forest and strolling through one. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist, spent decades studying what he called “flow”—those profoundly absorbed states in which time stands still and the mind is totally focused on a single task. He discovered that one of the most dependable ways for the average person to enter that state is through reading. Social media is practically designed to avoid it because of its reward loops and frequent disruptions.
Speaking with people who have rediscovered long reading afternoons after being away from them for years gives me the impression that they are genuinely surprised by their own abilities. On a rainy weekend, someone who usually only reads three pages before losing interest picks up a favorite book, and all of a sudden, four hours have gone by. The capacity never vanished. All it needed were circumstances that no one had been purposefully setting up. The phone in a different room proves to be a significant intervention rather than a small annoyance. It seems that the older, slower mode of attention can resurface when a person is physically close to their notifications.
It’s worth investigating why reading for an afternoon seems like such a luxurious activity. While watching a three-hour movie somehow doesn’t read as idleness in the cultural math of productivity, sitting still with a novel does. This might be because reading requires more of you, and activities that require more of you carry a slight sense of guilt when they are done solely for enjoyment. Or perhaps it’s more straightforward: your phone is constantly at your fingertips, constantly alerting you to something you should check, and a long afternoon of reading necessitates ignoring that suggestion for several hours at a time. In 2025, that will be difficult.
Here, too, the books themselves are important. One underappreciated reason why people give up on lengthy reading sessions is because they are working through a book or classic that they feel obligated to finish. Reading in the afternoon is not the same. When the book is truly captivating—the kind that makes you hate having to stop for water—it works best. When Sara Willoughby observed that reading doesn’t fit neatly into scheduled blocks—it requires a kind of emotional availability that can’t be forced, only planned for—she captured something genuine in her writing about seasons of reading.
It’s still unclear if the decline in leisure reading is cyclical or permanent, if the culture is just in between modes, or if there has been a real structural shift in the way attention is organized. Both directions are indicated by signals. Sales of literary fiction are not doing well. However, independent bookshops are starting to open. Oddly enough, online reading communities are flourishing. Even though they are having trouble taking long afternoons, people seem to miss them.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that those who do safeguard this time—those who actually spend five or six hours reading and letting the afternoon pass—use almost physical language to describe it. the decrease in cortisol. The specific fatigue that follows that promotes restful sleep. The feeling of actually being somewhere else.
Chloe Olliver is senior editor at vclib.org, where she leads editorial coverage of literary criticism, political commentary, cultural analysis, and the evolving relationship between literature and public life across New York City and beyond. With a career spanning the intersection of literary journalism, political commentary, and educational publishing, Chloe brings both rigorous research discipline, in-depth knowledge, experience, and an accessible editorial voice to subjects that most readers find thought-provoking and culturally significant.