Your monitor must be set at ridiculously hight brightness and low contrast, or you're just being obnoxious. I'd make text a tad dark, but it's not hard to read at all as it is.
I must be in the minority, since I see many sites with light grey text, but I find it very unusable.
Screen shot: http://www.diigo.com/item/image/yjhu/t4ix?size=o
I wonder why books are printed with black ink. Is it because publishers have bad designers? Or because the text is more legible that way?
It's certainly possible to go overboard with low contrast on web pages, but most of the research I've read suggests that there's a happy medium. What you want to aim for, IIRC, is around a 50-70 point difference in lightness on the LAB color scale between the main background and main body text, at least if you expect to be throwing article-length text at people rather than Twitter-length text.
What designers are trying to achieve by setting text to #333 and background to #f9f9f9 is exactly making screen contrast more like a book.
By lowering your screen brightness/contrast an unusual amount, you're solving the problem for all sites doing it wrong, but turning the ones who use proper contrast into crap. Who's to blame?