Empty Chair Diaries: Entry 12

What are we losing while we scroll?

I can’t believe reading is becoming a dying art.

We still read, of course, but so much of it now happens in a hurry. We scroll through Facebook, YouTube and everything else, searching for something worth stopping for. A headline. A photograph. A few seconds of a video. If it doesn’t catch us immediately, our thumb has already moved on.

We can spend hours doing it, until the very phone we are holding tells us we have had too much screen time.

We take our phones to the toilet. We sit with them in cafés. We reach for them while waiting in a queue and place them on the table when we are sharing a meal. Any small moment that was once left open for thinking, noticing or talking is now filled with scrolling.

There is something wrong with that.

We are connected to more people than ever, yet I wonder whether we are slowly losing touch with one another. We look down instead of around. We watch other people’s lives instead of talking to the person sitting across from us. Even the words we read now come with another question: was this written by a person, or was it written by AI?

I use AI, so I am not pretending it has no value. It can help us organise our thoughts and find the words we are struggling to say. But I don’t want it to replace the thinking, the feeling or the human story behind those words.

What is wrong with sitting down as we used to, opening a magazine and taking our time? There is something lovely about turning a page, feeling the paper between your fingers and smelling fresh print. A magazine does not flash, ping or hurry you along. It simply waits for you.

Reading asks something of our brains. It asks us to concentrate, imagine, remember and think. It teaches us new words and helps us understand how they belong together. If we no longer need to think about what we are writing, or even how to spell it, what happens to those parts of us?

Maybe the greatest thing we are losing is not reading itself, but stillness.

The empty chair is still there, waiting for us to sit down. The magazine is still on the table. The person opposite us may even have a story to tell.

We just need to put down the phone long enough to notice.