The Importance of Reading

It’s all too easy to overlook the importance of reading in your life.

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For many people, their job entails a lot of reading. However, there is NO pleasure taken in that reading. They are reading facts and figures for data input; customer comments and complaints; technical manuals; online materials; and other similar, largely uninteresting bits.

For many people, all their reading is done to glean info. This includes the aforementioned manuals, news, social media to keep up with friends and family, and similar. Largely not things that do much to stir the mind or spark the imagination.

This, it turns out, is a really easy trap to fall into. You get caught up in reading only for very specific purposes and don’t desire to read anything else.

Reading, however, is a fundamental way to relax, gain new knowledge and information, and get in touch with your subconscious self.

To be fair — there ARE people for whom reading has NEVER been a pleasure. They may suffer from dyslexia, or some other issue that makes reading an unpleasant chore. However — and I’ll get into this later — listening to audiobooks still counts as reading.

For a long time, I wasn’t doing much reading. As a writer, of course, I enjoy reading — but I made a lot of excuses for reading slowly and infrequently. Sure, I consumed a couple of books a year. But when I began to make a conscious effort to read more — the impact has been eye-opening.

I am not just sharing this idea because I’m a writer — but also because I believe the importance of reading impacts the fabric of our society.

Nonreaders set themselves up for misunderstanding

Reading — fiction or nonfiction outside of news and social media — opens the mind to critical thinking. Critical thinking engages the subconscious mind and opens you up to applying logic and reason. It causes you to engage in more than just a single viewpoint. It makes you curious about what else is out there.

When you choose to read — books specifically — you are deciding to engage your subconscious with your conscious mind.