🕮Reading Can Seriously Damage Your Ignorance
Why picking up a book might be the most radical thing you do today.
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I was once asked what the point of reading fiction was, with the person in question asking it with the sort of tone people reserve for things they think are beneath them and are sceptical of, but which they also suspect might be secretly important, like astrology or learning the names of their neighbours.
“What’s the point?” they asked. “It’s all made up.”
Which is, of course, the point.
Reading, whether it’s a well-worn paperback, a leatherbound tome, or a damaged magazine, doesn’t just teach you new things. It actively damages your ignorance.
It dents it. It bruises it. Hell, it gives it a solid kick in the shin that would make Nemanja Vidić proud. And in a world where people seem increasingly committed to being loud and wrong, where disinformation and misinformation are freely spread purely for fun or financial benefit, reading is one of the most noble acts of civil disobedience one can commit.
Let’s be honest: being ignorant, hiding in a cocoon and clinging to what we believe to be true is comfortable and easy. It’s like a badly designed sofa, soft in places it shouldn’t be, stubborn in all the wrong corners, and somehow still something people refuse to get rid of, either because of a memory, comfort, or fear. You can sit on it all day, insisting you know how the world works, because no one’s bothered to point out that you’ve been sitting backwards and there’s a giant hole in one of the pillows.
But then, one day, you pick up a book. Doesn’t matter what kind. Maybe it’s a novel with talking mice, philosophical ghosts, or space marines. Maybe it’s a pocket-sized biography of someone you vaguely admire because they wore nice coats. Maybe it’s a book about the history of water rights in the 19th century that you only bought because it was £1 in a charity shop and had a nice cover. Hell, maybe it’s something by Jean-Paul Sartre.
And suddenly, wham. Your ignorance takes a hit and staggers, the windows that you didn’t know were painted shut open wide, and you feel a breath of fresh air hit you, and you feel like you understand the world around you a little bit.
It doesn’t always feel comfortable, and sometimes it’s a bit like walking into your kitchen to discover it’s been reorganised by a particularly thoughtful raccoon. But every word you read, every idea you digest, and every thought that it adds to your consciousness adds a little more to you than you had before.
I know there’s a temptation to believe that we can get everything we need from the internet. That endless buffet of opinions, articles, arguments and cat memes. But here’s the thing: reading isn’t just about consuming. It’s about chewing, digesting, turning words over in your head like odd-shaped pebbles and realising some of them might be gems. Even subconsciously.
Fiction, especially, is far too often dismissed by the “serious-minded” as frivolous nonsense, but this ignores the actual benefit of reading stories created by someone who pulled the story from a random thought or a dream they had:
They’re not just fun distractions from lives that can be hard to bear; they’re empathy machines.
They smuggle emotions past the calloused defences that our lives have produced. They teach us what it’s like to live as someone else, sometimes someone we’d never meet in real life, sometimes someone we’d actively avoid, and give us an insight into a way of feeling, living, and loving that we may have never experienced.
You finish a good novel and, for a moment or three, you walk differently. You speak more slowly. You look at people more curiously. You think harder about the people you see on the bus to work, the man looking sadly out of the window, or the child beaming as they talk with their friends.
Your understanding of the human condition has gotten just a little better.
And then there are the non-fiction readers, the ones who mainline history books like espresso shots and can quote obscure 1970s French economists at the drop of a hat. People like me who read every single biography written by Barack Obama or are currently going through the life of French President François Mitterrand.
These are the books that remind us that the world has been a mess for a very long time, that what we’re seeing today isn’t ‘the worst it has ever been™’, and yet somehow, we’ve kept going. Reading history, politics, or philosophical texts is like reading the manual for the broken machine you live in.
It doesn’t necessarily fix it, but it stops you from sticking your fingers in the gears, and it can give you much-needed perspective, motivation, or hope.
Even the act of reading a memoir, someone else’s fumbling journey through life, their successes and reactions to events can be a revelation. It’s a reminder that people don’t arrive fully formed and that even the most successful among us have to do a lot of growing, maturing, and development before they reach their pinnacle.
Because reading is often a major reminder, and admission, that we’re all bumbling through the fog, occasionally hitting lampposts, occasionally discovering shortcuts. And sometimes, someone else’s wrong turn is the exact signpost you needed.
Of course, reading doesn’t always feel profound, and it doesn’t have to. Sometimes you’re halfway through a novel and realise you’ve spent fifteen minutes reading about the life cycle of a fictional beetle and can’t remember the main character’s name. Sometimes you put down a book and feel nothing more than a vague sense of annoyance that it wasn’t better.
Hell, sometimes you do what I do and read around 30,000 books about a fictional civil war called The Horus Heresy, and it adds absolutely nothing to your life. That’s fine. Not every book needs to change your life. Some of them just need to be decent company on a train ride or just plain fun.
It may even be too early for you to read a certain book or novel and fully grasp the message, having not yet lived through certain life events that alter your worldview and reveal the full meaning it can provide, because perspective does matter here.
But here’s the thing: even bad books make you think. Even silly stories shake up the snow globe of your thoughts. Reading provides new metaphors, fresh ways of framing the world, and innovative thoughts.
It gives you ammunition against apathy. It doesn’t matter if it’s a story about space pirates or a think piece on European trade policy. If it makes you ask one new question, it’s done something valuable.
So yes. Reading can seriously damage your ignorance. It can cause side effects like curiosity, humility, mild existential crises and the occasional desire to argue with strangers in cafes. It will not make you cool. It won't give you better abs, and it may not even make you look cool to the guy or gal you’re trying to impress at your book club.
But it will, reliably, make your world bigger, and quite frankly, in times like these, that might be the most radical thing you can do.
So go to your local bookshop, download something onto your Kindle or your Kobo e-reader and find the most interesting, fun book you can think of right now.
You will never regret it.
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