For nearly two decades, this Director watched a subtle transformation unfold in boardrooms, airport lounges, homes, classrooms and cafés. It did not arrive as a crisis with alarms or headlines. It arrived as a habit. The hand reaching for a phone before the mind had fully formed a thought. The conversation interrupted by a vibration, the question asked not to receive an answer, but to prepare the next response.
There was a time when waiting had its own atmosphere. A delayed train meant a paperback opened at the platform. A long flight meant a biography tucked into hand luggage. A quiet evening meant a lamp, a chair and a few pages that asked nothing except patience. Reading filled the small unclaimed spaces of life. It offered companionship in solitude and perspective in confusion.
Now those spaces are rarely empty. They are occupied, instantly and efficiently, by a stream of headlines, notifications, reels, messages, opinions, advertisements and manufactured urgency. The screen is not the enemy. It has brought knowledge, access and connection to billions. A library can now live in one’s pocket. Yet the same device that can carry the accumulated scientific knowledge of humankind is also training its owner to abandon a thought every few seconds.
Research has already observed that voluntary reading among teenagers and young adults is weakening, with fewer young people reading daily for pleasure. These figures do not prove that books have vanished. Digital reading, audiobooks, online essays and reader communities have created genuine new pathways into literature. But they do signal a deeper concern. Sustained attention, the inner room in which a difficult idea can be examined without interruption, is becoming increasingly scarce.
The Director noticed this scarcity in meetings. Participants came prepared with slides but not always with reflection. They carried data but did not always stay long enough with its meaning. Questions were raised, answers began, and yet eyes drifted toward screens before the answer had reached its difficult middle.
Listening had become an interval between speaking turns. In such a climate, leadership risks becoming performative. Fast opinions replacing considered judgement, instant reaction replacing responsibility, and loud certainty replacing the humility to learn.
An ancient Greek story offered the Director a lasting image for this condition. On his long journey home, Odysseus was warned that his ship would pass the Sirens, creatures whose songs were so beautiful and persuasive that sailors who followed it forgot their purpose, abandoned their course and were destroyed on the rocks. Odysseus did not pretend he was immune. He wanted to hear the song, but he also wanted to survive it. So, he instructed his crew to seal their ears with wax and tie him firmly to the mast. No matter how desperately he pleaded, they were not to release him until the danger had passed.
The Sirens did not overpower sailors through force. They defeated them through attention. In that sense, this myth also belongs powerfully to the present age. The endless feed, the alert, the provocative headline, the viral opinion and the next short video each make a similar promise. Look here now, this cannot wait. This is more important than the work, person or thought in front of you.
Odysseus’s wisdom was not simply willpower. It was the recognition that human attention is vulnerable and therefore requires structure. A person who wishes to read, think, listen and lead well must create a mast to which they can be tied. An hour without notifications, a phone left outside the room, a book carried during travel, a meeting in which screens are put away, a deliberate pause before responding. In a distracted world, discipline is not deprivation. It is the protection of one’s freedom.
The lives of respected leaders show that technology and reading need not be enemies. Bill Gates, who built one of the defining technology companies of the modern age, has long maintained a disciplined reading practice of roughly 50 books a year and continues to publish reading lists and recommendations through Gates Notes. His example matters not because everyone must match his volume, but because it rejects the false idea that technological sophistication makes deep reading obsolete. Warren Buffett has similarly described reading as central to the accumulation of knowledge and judgement.
For boards, senior leaders and stewards of institutions, the implications are practical as well as moral. Governance is, at its core, an exercise in attention. A board must read beyond the polished executive summary. It must notice what is absent from the risk register, question what is normalised by repetition and understand the long-term consequences concealed behind a favourable quarterly result. A director who only skims may miss the early warnings.
This responsibility reaches beyond formal governance. Families, schools, employers and communities must protect reading as a living practice rather than treating it as an old-fashioned ritual. The format matters less than the quality of attention. A printed book, a Kindle, an audiobook heard without multitasking, a long essay read on a tablet, each can create depth if it is given time and seriousness.
Let children see books open at breakfast tables, during journeys, in waiting rooms and before sleep. Let organisations create reading circles that are not merely networking exercises but places where people learn to disagree thoughtfully. Let boards occasionally discuss a text that has nothing to do with immediate profit, yet everything to do with judgement.
The Director recognized that he too was getting sucked into the same malaise. And then realized that the future will not be decided only by the speed of machines or the brilliance of algorithms. It will also be shaped by whether human beings retain the capacity to pause, listen, imagine and revise themselves. A society that loses the habit of reading does not merely lose books. It risks losing its tolerance for complexity, its memory of the past, its empathy for strangers and its ability to think before it reacts.
The screen will remain. Technology will advance. Information will become faster, more abundant and more persuasive. But the quiet reader, seated with an open book while the world demands immediate reaction, may become one of the most necessary figures of the future.
“The man who does not read has no significant advantage over the man who cannot read.” – Mark Twain
