I used to be the kind of person who always had a book on me, not in a curated, aesthetic way, but in a very real, slightly obsessive one. I read while eating, walking, waiting in line, even during commercials when my family had the TV on. Finishing a book gave me a specific kind of emotional high that nothing else quite replicated. It felt like I had lived inside something, like I had temporarily stepped out of my own life and into another. Reading was never something I had to convince myself to do. It was the thing I chose instinctively, without hesitation, without effort. And now, I cannot remember the last time I finished a book just because I wanted to.
The shift is not as simple as distraction or laziness, and it is not about losing interest in stories. It feels deeper than that, almost structural, like something in the way I process text has been rewired. If I trace it back honestly, a lot of it began with how college taught me to read. At some point, reading stopped being about immersion and became about extraction. In college, especially in political science and theory-heavy classes, you are not really asked to read in the way you once did. You are trained to process, to break down, to interrogate. Weeks revolve around dense, abstract texts where a single paragraph can take ten minutes to work through, where meaning is layered, recursive, and often deliberately difficult. You are not just following an argument; you are trying to map an entire system of thought. And over time, that becomes your default relationship to text.
A novel is no longer just a narrative. It becomes a site of ideological production, something to be situated within broader systems of power, history, and social hierarchy. You are trained to look for what is not immediately visible, to ask what assumptions are embedded, what structures are being reinforced or challenged, what historical context reshapes meaning, what theoretical framework can be applied. That training is not inherently bad. It is intellectually rigorous in a way that reshapes how you think across everything, not just literature. It sharpens your awareness and gives you language for things you may have always sensed but never fully articulated. But it comes at a cost, because when your weeks are dominated by dense political theory, by texts that require constant rereading, annotation, and decoding, reading itself starts to feel like effort before it even begins. The baseline expectation shifts. You begin to associate books not with immersion, but with strain, and that association lingers even when the material changes.
Because of that, you lose the ability to read passively, and passive reading is not a lesser form of engagement. It is what allows you to feel a story instead of constantly evaluating it. Before college, I could sit with a book and let it unfold. I did not feel the need to pause every few paragraphs and translate what I was reading into something analytical. I was not searching for arguments or anticipating how I would defend an interpretation. I was simply there, inside the text. Now, that instinct feels automatic in a different way. Even when I try to read something easy or fun, my brain does not cooperate. It starts categorizing themes, noticing patterns, questioning character motivations in a way that feels less emotional and more clinical. It is like I cannot turn off the part of my mind that has been trained to treat every text as something to be deconstructed, and because of that, reading begins to feel like work even when it technically is not.
The sheer volume of college reading only reinforces this shift. It is not just that the material is difficult; it is that there is too much of it. Hundreds of pages each week, across multiple classes, each demanding a different kind of attention. One course expects close reading, another theoretical application, another historical contextualization, but political science and theory courses in particular set the tone. They demand a level of precision and intensity that quietly teaches you to approach all reading in the same way. You do not have the luxury of slowing down, so you adapt. You skim strategically, look for key arguments, prioritize what will come up in discussion or what can be used in an essay. Over time, efficiency replaces depth. You stop reading for experience and start reading for output, constantly asking what you need to get from a text rather than what it is doing to you. That mindset does not disappear when the semester ends. It lingers, and when you finally have free time, reading no longer feels like an escape. It feels like a continuation of the same mental labor you have been doing all week, and naturally, you avoid it.
There is also a quieter shift in how you relate to interpretation itself. Before, reading felt personal. My understanding of a book belonged to me, even if it was imperfect. In college, interpretation becomes something that is constantly evaluated. There are better readings and worse ones, more sophisticated arguments, more theoretically grounded perspectives. You become aware, sometimes uncomfortably aware, of how your thoughts might be perceived. So instead of asking what you felt, you start asking whether your interpretation is valid. That subtle change creates distance between you and the text. You are no longer engaging with it as a reader but as a student, and that identity is hard to shed once it has been built into the way you think.
Political theory intensifies this even further because it demands precision at every level. You are not just reading for meaning; you are tracking arguments, definitions, contradictions, entire conceptual frameworks. You learn to sit with a paragraph, to reread it, to unpack it piece by piece until it makes sense. That kind of reading is mentally exhausting, and when it becomes your norm, everything else starts to feel filtered through that same intensity, even when it should not be. Burnout plays a role too, but not just general academic burnout. It is something more specific. When something you once loved becomes tied to deadlines, grades, and performance, your emotional response to it changes. Reading becomes associated with pressure. Even opening a book can carry a low-level sense of obligation, the feeling that you should be extracting something from it, that you are being inefficient if you are not analyzing deeply enough. So instead, you reach for things that feel lighter. You scroll, you watch, you distract, not because those are inherently better, but because they demand less from you.
It is easy to blame this on shrinking attention spans or social media, and that is part of the story, but it is also true that reading itself has become heavier. When something feels like a task, your brain resists it. It takes longer to settle into, easier to drift away from, and that only reinforces the idea that you have somehow become worse at reading, when in reality what has changed is your relationship to it. What makes this especially frustrating is that the desire never really goes away. I still want to be the person who can read for hours without noticing time passing, who can disappear into a story and come out of it feeling like I have lived somewhere else entirely. But wanting that feeling and accessing it are no longer the same thing, because now there is a layer of awareness that did not exist before, a layer of analysis and expectation and pressure that sits between me and the text.
College did not take away my ability to read. It reshaped it, made it more disciplined, more critical, more precise. But in doing so, it also made reading feel heavier, less instinctive, less joyful. And I think this shift is more common than we admit. We say we are too busy, too tired, too distracted, but underneath that is something more complicated. We were taught to read in a way that prioritizes understanding over experience, and once you learn to read like that, especially through the constant grind of dense, theory-heavy political science texts, it becomes very difficult to return to reading simply for the sake of it. Not impossible, but no longer effortless.