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Comment by kthejoker2 | Hacker News Reader

Nothing new under the sun ...

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Human contacts have been so highly valued in the past only because reading was not a common accomplishment and because books were scarce and difficult to reproduce. The world, you must remember, is only just becoming literate. As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet.

- Aldous Huxley, Chrome Yellow

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I'm not sure I would agree with this statement. I think there needs to be a balance of both solitude and human interaction, and that balances differs from person to person. I’m definitely more introverted but it doesn’t mean I don’t need human interaction. An example is that I play a ton of video games, one reason is for the solitude, but I also enjoy board games for the social component. At the core of games, I love the strategy and competition, but different types of games can scratch different itches. I think things like that can apply to a lot of parts of life.

All this quote says is that solitude through literature will become a natural tendency. Which it definitely has become, much more than in the centuries before today.

> As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium.

spoken like a true hermit....material objects cannot replace human connection...the author of that quote is escaping that harsh truth which I'm sure he realized towards the end like so many others that came before him.

Books are both written and read by humans. That is human connection.

> because reading was not a common accomplishment

This isn't true, not even in his lifetime. In 1870, the illiteracy rate among whites was 11%. It dropped even lower after that. 89% seems pretty "common" to me.

Blacks were much higher, but slavery had only just ended. That group hit 11% about 1947.

https://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/lit_history.asp

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