Cultural scholar warns declining reading habits threaten society's ability to cope

Estonian writer and cultural scholar Maarja Vaino has raised concerns, in comments published by ERR News, that reading habits are deteriorating across society, with long-term consequences for people's ability to think, remember and empathize with others.

Vaino notes that the classic image of an idyllic summer day — someone relaxing with a book — has become closer to fantasy than reality. Even parents who complain that mandatory summer reading is unfair to their children spend much of their own time scrolling on phones, a trend confirmed by several studies, including a reading habits survey completed this spring.

Entertainment displacing deep reading

According to Vaino, the issue is not entertainment literature itself — she enjoys crime novels in summer too. But alongside lighter reading, society needs to preserve the ability to engage with complex, multilayered texts. Fast-paced TV series that rely heavily on flashbacks, along with social media platforms like TikTok, have trained people's brains toward fragmented attention and quick forgetting.

Consequences: weaker attention and empathy

Vaino argues that reading demanding literature trains attention, memory, concentration, patience and a broad emotional range. Studies she cites show that readers of fiction perform better on empathy-related tasks and are more accurate at reading emotions from other people's facial expressions than those who mainly read nonfiction.

In societies where serious literature is abandoned, researchers say the effects are already visible: fragmented attention, short memory, distorted truth, forgotten history, and discussions reduced to slogan-shouting. Young people lacking memory, concentration and empathy become easy to manipulate — a vulnerability authoritarian regimes have historically exploited by restricting access to books.

Vaino calls on parents who see mandatory summer reading as a burden to instead pick up a more demanding text themselves, alongside their children, noting that society's future depends significantly on what people continue to read.