By someone who still thinks grammar matters
It’s happening. I’m writing a book. A full-length, printed-on-dead-trees, hold-it-in-your-hands-like-it’s-the-early-2000s book. Because apparently I have a masochistic streak and a deep-seated desire to be wildly underappreciated in the age of microcontent and microwave attention spans.
Let’s start with the obvious: No one reads anymore.
And I don’t mean “nobody reads novels anymore” or “people prefer audiobooks.” I mean we’re functionally illiterate by choice. If it’s not captioned, animated, or under 15 seconds long, it’s basically ancient scripture. We now consume information via sparkly fonts, trending audio, and people lip-syncing foreign policy summaries while applying contour.
Here are some grim but unsurprising stats:
- Over 50% of Americans haven’t read a single book in the past year. Not even a trashy beach read. Not even a self-help book with “F*cks” in the title to make it feel edgy.
- The average attention span has dropped to 8.25 seconds, which is lower than a goldfish’s.
- One in five Gen Zers gets their news from TikTok, where war crimes are explained by people dancing in a ring light.
- Twitter/X trained us to believe that 280 characters is a long-form essay, and anything longer should be adapted into a thread with bullet points and GIFs for people who need help parsing “your” from “you’re.”
- Instagram Reels have taken over Google as the preferred source of “how-to” education, which is why someone recently tried to DIY their taxes using a thirst trap.
So of course, in the midst of this societal literacy apocalypse, I decided: “You know what the world needs? A book. A long one. With chapters. And feelings.”
Because apparently I’m the kind of idiot who yells poetry at speeding traffic.
But here’s the thing. I’ve never had a problem writing. Words just tend to pour out of me—whether I’m scribbling with a pen or slamming on a keyboard—the way shitty opinions tend to fall out of certain people’s mouths at family gatherings. It’s involuntary. It’s relentless. It’s therapy without the insurance co-pay. If I don’t write, I get emotionally constipated. If I do write, I bleed meaning across the page and occasionally confuse it with healing.
And yet… every time someone asks what I’m up to and I say, “I’m writing a book,” they react like I’ve announced a plan to open a VHS rental store.
“Oh! Wow! Good for you! That’s… brave.”
“Are you gonna self-publish?”
“Let me know when it’s a podcast.”
“I’ll totally repost the link!”
“You should make it a reel!”
Cool. So basically, I should cut out the middleman and turn my 300-page manuscript into a meme slideshow narrated by Morgan Freeman’s AI voice and set to an emotionally manipulative piano track on CapCut.
But still, I write. I write when I’m happy. I write when I’m spiraling in the shower wondering if my life peaked at 27. I write because sometimes it’s the only way I know how to hold a thought still long enough to examine it without screaming. I write because in a year, when I’m hopefully healthier or at least better medicated, I’ll look back at these pages and see evidence that I survived. And in case I don’t make it that long—well, at least my voice will echo on, like hieroglyphics left on the digital bathroom wall of humanity.
As an atheist, this is my version of an afterlife: being quoted posthumously in someone’s therapy session.
“He was so real for saying that.”
“This line? Devastating.”
“Too bad no one bought the book.”
Sometimes I think maybe I should’ve been a YouTuber. I could’ve sat in front of a ring light, sighing through eyeliner, whispering chapter excerpts over ASMR rain sounds. Maybe then people would listen. But instead, I’m here—fighting with syntax and structure like it’s the 1800s and my emotional life depends on it. Because it kind of does.
Writing a book in 2025 is like opening a fax machine repair shop in the age of Neuralink. It’s slow. It’s thankless. It’s not viral content. But it’s mine. And if nobody ever reads it? That’s fine. I’ll still know I screamed something into the void that wasn’t an Instagram caption or a TikTok rant or a “hot take” regurgitated for clout.
So yes, I’m writing a book. Because I’m stupid. Because I believe words can outlive us. Because I still think nuance matters. Because I want someone, someday, to feel seen on a page the way I once did in a dimly lit library aisle, knees to my chest, holding a paperback like a lifeline.
And if not?
I’ll at least have a really niche, emotionally devastating pull quote for my gravestone.
“He wrote a book. No one read it. But damn, that comma placement was flawless.”