the great shrinkening

May 30, 2026 · 3 min read

When traced through literary history, there’s a clear trend of smaller and smaller books,

• War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy, 1869): ~587,000 words.
• Ulysses (James Joyce, 1922): ~265,000 words.
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (JK Rowling, 1997): ~77,000 words.
• Convenience Store Woman (Sayaka Murata, 2016): ~35,000 words.

and it is not merely coincidence that, less people are reading books as well.

It used to be that, readers had 70+ hours of time to read through Tolstoy describing the French invasion of Russia. But that is just not the world we live in anymore. There is constant pressure to keep moving. Erudition is reserved for the 0.01% who are not working 3 shifts to make ends meet.

The Great Shrinkening is not happening for books alone. this is a trend that holds true for almost all content format, News headlines , articles , music , documentaries , movies .

A lot of content being consumed is through short notes and video formats, but reality has a surprising amount of detail and the more we try to compress them into leaky abstractions and simplify, we lose a lot of detail.

Over time, this shrinkening ends up getting propagated and habituated in the next generation. having read through 215,000 words of Moby Dick sometime in the last decade, I can safely confirm that it is not in my capacity to slog through those many words anymore.

It is difficult for me to take a long walk or cook without my earphones on. while it is odd for my parents to wear earphones while working. I wonder if the next generation would find it odd to walk while not scrolling through their phones (I partly already do this.)

This is worrisome because to get anything done especially in the complex cultural hive we live in, one needs to do some form of deep work . Without which we’re nothing more than a Humming bird flitting between flowers, always eating but never having a meal and never feeling full.

A few weeks ago, I was in the difficult situation of taking care of children who were a whole 20 years younger to me. and it was so disheartening to realize that their capacity to comprehend is being shrunk further than I can imagine. youtube and Youtube shorts (which are their favorite form of entertainment), only provide content that appeals to their limbic system. the split-screen videos where the creators have to overlay, one slop video (of them reacting) on top of another slop video to make it interesting enough. the pavlovian habituation of using similar sounds, colors and reactions to keep the audience engaged. were al very frightening to see, especially as a new dad trying to think about the next 30 years of society.

I used to think Dario Amodei was exaggerating when he said, “help the developing world catch up to the developed world” . But his intuition is right, it is so much easier for our next generation to get stuck in a local optima and not get out of it. My hometown does not have a library so it is safe to say that children aren’t going to libraries, and it is becoming rarer still for them to pick a book on their own interest. In reality why would they? when youtube and instagram promise you to bring the worlds knowledge in real time as they are happening.

I hope a few decades from now, when we look back these days are treated similar to how society encouraged pregnant women to smoke and drink. because we really are culling the abilities of our next generation. while the wealth divide becomes ever so wider.

We live in an information deluge at the same time that our capacity to understand them is being shrunk by market forces.