Why are people around me so upset about the fact that people don't read much anymore?
I dont get it, why do they care about other people's life?
Is it just about reminding people that you read while most people don't? Do they feel special and unique?
Honestly, I wouldn't even care if I was the last man on earth reading books.
Are you twelve?
Readers imagine a world where they sit in a garden at an iron table in the springtime with friends talking philosophically about the books they read.
>>7846336
Reading has been shown to improve empathy. There, one reason from at least three.
>>7846354
If you think this sort of conversation or friendship is strictly imaginary then I feel real bad for you. Growing up in one of the least intellectual places in the south I could still find people to talk literature with.
>>7846336
Reading is one of the only ways you truly get to know the world and other people, and from that it becomes the only way you can define yourself as an individual. You don't get that from cliched tv shows, or mind-numbing video games. People who spend their whole lives on those base entertainments always grow up incredibly shallow, and we don't need to further taint humanity's collective unconciousness.
>>7846364
I should have expanded the utopia to talking to strangers at bus stops, standing in line at grocery stores, eating thanksgiving dinner, talking with the neighbor standing outside watering his lawn.
You're right OP it is very silly to care if other people read.
People acting this way is very common and it occurs with a wide variety of things. It's called virtue signalling, I'd advise you to just not pay it any mind, even bothering to refute it gets you caught up in it. Take your post for instance.
>>7846377
You're very stupid.
>>7846387
Reading also improves rhetorical skills, so you never have to resort to name-calling, a form of "argument" non-readers love to use.
Special snowflake syndrome.
>>7846346
Are you?
I take the subway everyday and see lots of people reading. sadly they are usually reading crap. but they are reading.
>why are people around me so upset about the fact that people don't read much anymore?
Nerds tryna stunt on the illiterate
>>7846383
Looks like we're both caught up in it now too, anon.
>>7846336
Because reading is one of the highest positive correlations there is for success. If you are around people who don't read, you are around losers, not winners. That doesn't mean you should bother to fix them, just avoid them.
I wouldn't care if we lived in an autocracy.
>>7846869
Do you actually believe this?
Because a lot of people would not read if it didn't give them that cultured, quiet, educated, "interesting" aura. They can be special snowflakes with little effort, and complaining about being the only one who's enlightened is always comfy. That's the reason why most people who bitch all day about how illiteratacy rules world/country/generation/whatever will never read anything appart from genre novels or best sellers and will always avoid anything that can question their value system. I know plenty of people like that: it's the dude who tries to read Ulysses and didn't even bothered to read Dubliners before, all of the teenagers who try to write like Bukowski, most genre fiction readers...
Their interest in reading book X=how cultured will they look to others when telling they read it (high numbers are the better)/how easy or comfy will be the reading (low numbers are the easiest).
>>7846869
Are people on /lit/ winners then?
>>7846908
http://www.freemoneyfinance.com/2013/04/reading-and-wealth.html
http://www.success.com/mobile/article/16-rich-habits
https://www.aitp.org/news/103320/
http://www.asccc.org/content/reading-may-be-key-unlocking-basic-skills-success
http://richhabits.net/is-there-a-correlation-between-being-rich-and-reading-habits/
>>7847113
Do you understand what correlation means? Rich people all tend to read more, that doesn't mean that reading directly leads to being rich, or being rich directly leads to reading more.
>>7847121
fuck off
>>7846336
Most people who aren't autists value their hobbies and want to be around people who share them so they can mutually discuss topics pertaining to it. If the people around you are upset people don't read much anymore they're either bitter geriatric people who will find any reason to hate the current generation or more likely they are people lamenting that they have no one to share this interest with.
>>7846336
If nobody's reading what's everybody got to talk about?
>>7847131
>I'm wrong, so I'll just insult you
Dismissed.
>>7846336
>Is it just about reminding people that you read while most people don't? Do they feel special and unique?
You already answered your own question.
tell them you're slowly going blind, then ask them if they'll read Gravity's Rainbow to you.
the chapter about Brigadier Pudding.
that will get rid of them.
>>7847250
Everyday life.
I have no idea either because most people's idea of reading is sitting down with genre shit.
Reading is pointless to be quite honest family person. Any narrative that existed in fiction has been translated into the more visual media a hundred times better. Any knowledge that's worth a damn in the real world can only be acquired by the combination of real world experience with just the bare minimum of theory. We have the internet for vocabulary and power point presentation templates for prose. What more would you want ?
