There is something slightly tragic about the way we approach books now. Imagine asking Toni Morrison for a checklist, or asking James Baldwin to write you a clear cut plan on how to live your life full of liberation and imagination. How about asking Dostoyevsky for the perfect morning routine? This sounds obscene and ridiculous, but somewhere along the way in the literature industry we’ve started expecting books to act like that: an explicit clean-cut way to live our lives instead of looking in between the words to find our own solace.
It was somewhere in the late 2000s when the sudden increase in interest of the self-help genre terrorized our dusty Ikea bookshelves. Of course, it started as a way to prove your superiority complex, with friends coming over for wine nights and gawking at how well-read and put-together you must be. Maybe they’re admiring how much of a relationship vixen you must be as the copy of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus sits on the coffee table as decor. Institutions and industries during this time were falling, therapy became a luxury (still is), community became fragmented, and work began to become unstable. Self-help stepped into the shoes of guidance and gave lost souls a path to figure things out without having to think for yourself. Here is the blueprint, here is the foundational work, now go find yourself.Â
Somewhere between a recession, the rise of the Internet, and the “morning routine green juice industrial complex,” we started prioritizing speed. Novels started asking too much time and nuance of us, so a random paperback by someone probably involved in a pyramid scheme with wealthy parents taught us how to change our lives just by chapter three. This is not a complaint about the entire genre of self-help, or young people, or attention spans, or the Internet. These arguments are mostly tired, overplayed and often miss the mark. Gen Z is not entirely shallow, in fact, we circle around meaning, yet avoid its closeness because of our fear of reality. What we are missing as consumers is not our capacity for depth; we occupy that and search for it (or run away from it) every time we pick up the phone – but it is our refusal to abandon anything that doesn’t instantly reward us.
We live in an age where time is a problem to be solved. Time encapsulates everything around us, and yet, we avoid it like the plague. We need packages to be shipped overnight, text messages to be answered as soon as you read them, and now healing and self-progression has a deadline quicker than a 15-second TikTok. It is the constant cycle of figuring it out as quickly as you can so you can grow efficiently, and be a better worker, a better student, a better anything that fills the role you occupy in our era of late-stage capitalism. Any time used for wondering, thinking, or reflecting is instantly drowned out by notifications or other occupants of our time. Self-help books did not create this culture, but fit perfectly into the hole it made for itself. Then, there was a subtle change in reading habits. Books became a matter of answering the question “what will this do for me?”, a means to justify our usage of time.Â
So, when a novel doesn’t answer that quickly or as fast as we want it to in an age of instant gratification, we get impatient. A novel is an infrastructure that holds messiness, contradiction, and imperfection. A novel is like getting a really long voice memo from a friend when you maybe just could’ve gotten that same information from a two sentence text. What lies in the novels, similar to that friend’s voice memo, is the nuance, the passion, and the ability to appreciate standing in time and stretching the moment until it reveals itself to you. It is the ability to gain answers within the journey, and not rushing to solve them. Toni Morrison did not write to comfort or console you. James Baldwin did not pick up his pen in 1960s France to motivate you to get to your 9-to-5 as efficiently as possible. bell hooks did not write All About Love for you to master your relationships in just three easy steps, and Kant did not write about beauty so you could experiment with “looksmaxxing” to get Instagram famous. Nothing about classic literature is optimized for speed, and none of them cared if the meaning behind their words was too long for the fast-paced life you may lead. They wrote things that required patience and uncomfortability. Their prose is meant to haunt you and to stay with you in times of isolation, in times of thinking, and in times of reflection. The time spent thinking is supposed to feel scary and uneasy. Philosopher Hannah Arendt said it best, “There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.” Modern literature may be gone because we just do not have the time to do the task of mindful reading.Â
At the same time, other genres have emerged in popularity. Fantasy and romance, to be exact. What they offer is an escape. It is catharsis from the monotonous and draining image of our real lives. Why be a full-time student swallowed in student debt and social seclusion when you can be on vacation with your best friend who you accidentally fall in love with? What these genres are asking from you is to stay in this universe as long as you’d like. In a world that is constantly asking you to be efficient, these genres are often asking you to feel everything and anything that is obsolete and missing from your world. So, the difference between this and “classics” lies in ambiguity. Classics don’t give you resolutions. Classics are less concerned with satisfying arcs and resolutions, and more concerned with unearthing the weight of image, morality, identity, and politics. Classics leave you with nothing but yourself. One asks you to sojourn, and the other one asks you to disappear for just a bit.Â
Self-help and escapism genres sell something crucial to you, which is clarity. They tell you what things mean, how you are supposed to feel, what you are supposed to do, what framework you need, or where you might be going. These both are structured around the satisfaction of fulfillment. You will get your time’s worth. There is a meaning to spending your little time to accomplish reading this book. However, classics do not reward you. They confront. It is not satisfactory, it often is not fulfilling, and it does not promise to transform you or your life by the end of chapter ten. You are the bearer of your own fulfillment. You are the only person that can understand the message you gain from reading classics. It is tailored for you, but you have to take the time to think. You have to create the meaning within yourself. You have to be okay with being unsettled.Â
So no, maybe modern literature isn’t dead, and no, self-help did not kill the book industry, and fantasy and romance haven’t necessarily replaced it, but our reading habits have been massively altered. We demand a quick payoff and an instantaneous answer to our problems. If we want new classics, we have to loosen our grip on what constitutes our time as “valuable.” We need to loosen the constraints on what we deem as “useful.” Books thrive on being strange and ambiguous, and we, as humans, thrive on making meaning in between the strange and ambiguous. We create life and clarity through those cracks. Not every book will save you, and every book should confuse you. So, if we make room for all of that and let ourselves idle in the fickle, classics can start to feel like something we are building and creating, and not something from centuries ago that you pick up for required reading.Â