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A 15 year old niece told me this week that she can’t be bothered to read because she gets bored by the time she gets to the end of the first page. “Why do that when I have TikTok and YouTube?”

It seems like there’s going to be a generation of people who don’t have to pretend to read - they simply don’t care to, and it doesn’t confer the same status TikTok fame does.

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I am fairly certain that that has held true for a majority of people in the previous generation (and the ones before that), too.

Most people don’t read. This is not remotely new.

It was the same in the previous generation. Not reading school assigned books isn't new to gen Z. People were considered way more odd if they did read the books. Even more so if they said they enjoyed it.

Having had the experience of having read on my own time as a younger teen a book that was on the school curriculum in my later teens, I will say there is something about dissecting a book so you can write essays on it that is pretty effective at removing the enjoyment.

I wouldn't take the unpopularity of school-assigned reading to indicate much about how people would actually feel about reading, but of course there were plenty of classmates who only read the books assigned in school where it would have coloured their opinions on reading as a whole

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