Being A “Reader” Doesn’t Mean Disengaging With The World

The more time I spend on the internet, the more I’m aware of the trope of the isolated, misunderstood and oversensitive reader. It emerged from a lonely adolescence, where books gave the reader a language no one else speaks. As the reader gets older, they slowly turn into the romantic literary figure, silently observing the world while scratching down their poignant observations.

While treating reading as a respite before entering the world again is healthy, in my experience, it becomes an escape if we’re not careful with it. Sometimes, we’re not lonely readers; we’re lonely, period. Sometimes, we’re not isolated readers; we’re isolated people. Reading then becomes a convenient justification for a lack of engagement with the world.

This post isn’t here to discredit reading but to correct an excessive attitude that bars us from new experiences.

Self-Referential Reading

I recently wrote a post on the damaging effects of being overly productive in relation to Byung-Chul Han’s Achievement Society, and I’d like to elaborate on this idea in this letter.

For Han, an Achievement Society encourages excessive self-reference. Everything, from our leisure activities to the media we consume, turns into acts of reinforcing the Self. One might keep drinking beer to remain manly, while another will pick up obscure poetry to maintain the status of the misunderstood reader.

And when this identity is disturbed by the Other, we’ll do everything we can to retreat back to what we know and perpetuate this self-reference. American sociologist Richard Sennett, cited in Han’s The Burnout Society, made a note about this narcissistic tendency:

“The narcissist is not hungry for experiences, he is hungry for Experience. Looking always for an expression or reflection of [oneself].”

The relation to the Other is effectively eliminated, spawning transactional relationships with no depth. Instead of asking: what can I learn from you? Befriending the Other turns into: how can you re-enforce what I already am? This creates echo chambers where communities all hold the same opinion while the cell phone mirrors our self-image right back to us.

All of this rings true for online book communities, too. There’s a fine line between sharing reading experiences and mutually re-enforcing one another’s identities as readers.

The Loss of Self

While this self-referential identity might seem solid, it’s unstable and fragile in reality. A stable identity doesn’t need constant reassurance and self-promotion to survive; it simply is. A person isn’t a reader but a person who prefers reading. Yet, like how John Berger described the status of women in Classical paintings, the late-modern reader watches themself being looked at when they’re reading.

This appeal to the spectacle forces the reader to cherry-pick activities that fit the mould, to the point where every reader has candles on their desk while tea-stained papers rest next to their dripping fountain pens. Unlike the repressive kind under negative power, this type of conformity is voluntary. We’ve willingly diluted our identities to fit the mould of a reader while barring ourselves from new experiences.

Han wrote:

“Experience [Erfahrung] involves encountering the Other. It alters. Experiencing [Erlebnis], in contrast, expands the ego into the Other, into the world. It compares.”

But if we’re bent on maintaining our self-references while echoing the same preferences back to ourselves,

“Reference to the Other goes missing, no stable self-image can form.”

In other words, being open to new people and experiences is about putting ourselves in uncertainty while observing our reactions. The Self encounters the Other and learns its natural likes/dislikes through comparison, resulting in an identity that’s grounded and open to change.

But a rigid self-definition is always paranoid and afraid of surprises lest they undermine this self-image. Therefore, the identity of the lonely reader is the perfect recipe for self-reference. By being alone, nothing could challenge the identity or establish new preferences. By being a reader, the act of reading feeds back into being alone, giving rise to the slogan:

“I like books more than I like people (the Other).”

Re-engaging with the world

Byung-Chul Han concluded The Burnout Society with a brilliant observation on exhaustion. For him, our daily exhaustion and burnout is “the pathological expression of late modern-[person]’s failure to become [them]self.”

If we fall in love with a self-image (being a reader, for instance), it takes work and initiative to keep up this spectacle (especially in the age of social media). It gets to a point where the reader reads to put on a show while negating the pleasure of reading altogether. When this show exhausts the reader, they’ll begin to resent the very thing they claimed to love. And the same principle applies to any identity we’re attached to.

The solution here is simple: exposure to new life experiences. Through encountering differences (travelling to a different country, trying out a new recipe, reading a new book genre), a comparison will naturally reveal our likes/dislikes. This self-image emerges organically and cannot be replicated because no two people have the same life experience.

It also makes us more interesting as people. Some of the most well-read people in my life are wonderful smorgasbords of eclectic interests. My friend Hannah is the smartest philosophy person I know, but she still adores watching pro wrestling. My partner’s best friend, K., is a law student, yet she works as a professional DJ on the side. Even Professor Helen De Cruz, a university chair, finds time to practice the Renaissance lute and archlute when she’s not working.

I’ll end with something my friend Manfred said when we shared a pint at the university pub:

“Whenever we’re stuck in the labyrinth of our minds, we have to return to the labyrinth of the world.”