You Don't Have Time to Read Books That Won't Change Your Life

Oh yes you do.

Life is about enjoying things in the moment, with no preset expectations about whether it will change one's life or not.

Meanwhile the books/movies/music that do end up changing our lives do so not because we were hoping they would. Or even because they seemed so moving or meaningful at the time. But by their impressions mixing with other events that happened much later in life. In ways no one on the internet could possibly predict, because they're unique to us.

Many of the most important books I've read were ones I just that someone just dumped somewhere, from authors I had never heard of, and that I read not for a life-changing experience, but just to kill time.

Serendipity is what I think they call this.

Or you could read books you enjoy, since your position in the race will not meaningfully extend your life.

What a depressing and limited view of reading.

The flaw with this argument is you don't really know which books will change your life and when that will occur. There's no looking at a cover and reading a blurb on a dust jacket and knowing for sure it's a banger.

Sometimes, the value of experience only presents itself years later. I thought I was wasting a year of my life working in a chocolate factory, but I reflect on those experiences and lessons I learned every day, a decade later. Books are experiences we transmit to others.

I'm all for mind-blowing books, but this manic search for The Optimally Life-Changing Set of Books mostly just sounds like a great way to leach all the pleasure from reading.

>The Internet Archive provides 44 million books you can borrow for free

Well, about that...

This is a depressingly utilitarian view of reading.

I don't think you need to read books that change your life, just read books you enjoy. I read Ready Player One a while back and it was a good book. I enjoyed reading it. I wouldn't say it changed my life though

> ask "is this already beginning to transform me or not?"

Hot take: books don't change your life. You have to take what you've read and integrate it into your life through action. It doesn't happen through osmosis. It takes time and effort.

There's a phrase for books that are designed to "change your life" by changing your perception: epiphany porn. A magic realization that changes your life forever until you forget it next week because you're onto the next book that promises another epiphany.

Judging from the picture of this blogger's bookshelf, this is advice about reading from a non-reader. Almost any book will change your life if you let it, but that's a poor criterion for selecting a book, since you won't know how it's affected you until you finish reading it. Naïvely sorting books based on their preconceived life-changing potential will probably steer you towards vapid self-help books that promise to "change your life" in their subtitle. Most of those books are garbage. I mean that literally—they'll end up in your bookstore's free pile in ten years, or in the trash.

This blogger also implies that there's just no way to decide what to read. With 40 million, or even 4 million, books to choose from, who can pick? As if it were just a matter of picking one out of a hat. It's like he hasn't seen a bibliography, or Goodreads, or even just a list of books that some publisher puts online.

Here's a better plan: you should read the great books. They will change your life, but in deeper, more subtle ways. Start with the Greeks, then the Romans, medieval poets, Elizabethan dramatists, Enlightenment philosophers, Victorian novelists, and modernists. But don't take my word for it. Read any one of the hundreds of books about the Western canon. Skim the table of contents of the Harvard Classics series. Go through the Modern Library list of best books of the 20th century. A good rule is: is it an old book, but still in print, and still being widely discussed (in books, not on Reddit)? If so, read it. There's a reason there are still annual conferences where people are discussing Plato, Milton, Woolf, Joyce, and so on. There's a reason there are whole libraries dedicated to Shakespeare alone. There's no such phenomenon which surrounds the latest self-help book trending on TikTok.

Here's an example: should you read Hamlet, or Atomic Habits? Reading Hamlet will expose you to complex human emotions, deep ideas, and ingenious turns of phrase. It will unlock for you a whole wing of the library which discusses it, and conversations with others that have read it. You'll understand the many references to the play throughout Western culture, and the books that are based on it. On the other hand, reading Atomic Habits might change the way you think about your habits. I quite enjoyed it myself. It was interesting. But a hundred years from now, people are still going to be reading Hamlet, and the same is not true for whatever so-called "life-changing" book came out last week.

I wouldn't say that this applies to me because I do not intend to turn my life around for every piece of entertainment I read / watch. We could apply the same principle for movies, shows, music, etc. but I think this kind of mindset would lead me straight to burnout. Thanks for sharing your point of view, take care.

Sometimes it seems we are being encouraged to hyperoptimise our lives, to a point where time and motion dictate we ought run while shitting.

> « Esope, ce grand homme, vit son maistre qui pissoit en se promenant : Quoy donq, fit-il, nous faudra-il chier en courant ? » — MdM (ca. ~1580)

https://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Montaigne_-_Essais,_Éd_d...

There was that time I read a book that "changed my life" and it caused a mental health crisis. Nein danke!

Ugh, min-max culture is out of control. But I think this essay is actually anti-mediocre-books, which sort of resonates with me. Still, though, I find value in the hunt, and I am too stubborn to stop a book once I've started, so I can't agree with author's ruthless selection criteria, but if it works for them, hey, party on.

...my life, as I define and live it, is improved every time I cheer on Mr. Lee's Rat-Thing during a casual re-read of Snow Crash. :)

I just got done reading Jew Suss by Lion Feuchtwanger, would recommend.

I don’t need to minmax books just like I don’t need to minmax my life or my productivity, no matter what all these pretentious articles that try to push emotional buttons with fomo, unnecessary urgency, or feelings of inadequacy. Hell, sometimes a book that you didn’t care about when you read it becomes more prominent unexpectedly down the line.

Even if I consume some (imaginary, of course) empirically perfect amount of Damned Good Books while saving 50,000 orphans as I run 17 simultaneous triathlons and complete my third PhD and turn my fourth startup into an IPO I will still die in the blink of an eye, still leave things unfinished and rough, and still be erased by time. I’d rather embrace the inefficiency of living insofar as it brings contentment.

You do you, but please don’t try to tell me what I do or don’t have time for.