Meaningful New Years resolutions are rare. Left to your own devices they often are made poorly. You may resolve to do something that you should have been doing at least a year prior: like going to the gym or getting your bleeding gums down from Niagara Falls to the elevator in The Shining. And as with the year before, it may be too late. Or you may make a resolution that places the burden on other people: like cutting off contact with people who profess openly and without apparent shame to like The Dead Don’t Die. While that reduces the number of toxic influences in your life, it hardly demands much labor on your part.
Resolutions of substance are rare because they are more difficult. It’s difficult to admit even to yourself that drastic change is needed, let alone that that change must come from within if it is to have any impact without. Of course all is not lost so soon into the new year. It is to your great fortune that I have not resolved to stop telling you how to live. Last New Year’s I offered something like a menu. This year I find myself more focused, and yet broader. I offer only one resolution of such importance that it could—and should—apply very widely. In 2024, you will unlearn how to read.
If the best resolution is both personally demanding and widely beneficial, there is no resolution more fitted to perfection than that of taking up illiteracy. At the moment you think it entirely impossible. Even if you don’t place a significant value on reading or language, you have accepted it as the surest sign of civilized existence. And any civilization long enough in years takes its members’ ability to read for granted; as such, reading becomes rather habitual in the same way that smoking and biting your nails is habitual. Yet reading is neither cool like smoking nor gross like nail-biting, so not to see it as something to be overcome is entirely reasonable, and hence why it is so demanding and worthy to be so.
Let it be some encouragement that once you commit you will find it is not quite so demanding as I just made it out to be. Why this is so must be set aside for the moment. Ease yourself from any anxieties stemming from the practical and consider a possible liberation from literacy’s malign hazards.
Think of losing language as gaining precious immunities. The most immediate immunity being to modern correspondence. The email and the text message are our most relied-upon means of personal exchange, and our most hated. Some of the merits for that hate are a little disingenuous, such as the boastful lament of a four-figure inbox, or having too full and active a life to answer a ream of text messages in a timely fashion. But many are perfectly justified. Most emails are, indeed, superfluous and nuisance-causing. Emails from family members come badly formatted and with contents either utterly vacuous or offensive—there is no in-between. Emails from friends are more ominous, either following or anticipating a conflict. Text messages, on the other hand, are often the accelerants of conflict. Typing in real time is one of the great dangers of our age. That it hasn’t caused more wide-scale showdowns (that we know of) is beyond belief. In theory this is not supposed to be the case. Why fumble with your own voice in spoken conversation when you can be Mamet on your phone? But that much-romanticized precision in speech—divorced as it is from body language, vocal tone, and basic context—gives way to every possible verbal breakdown, from simple but devastating misunderstanding to evasive, obfuscatory rhetoric.
Next, and likely more welcome, is the immunity to the glut of content. Nothing instills the feeling of having your whole life returned to you than the inability to comprehend clickable language. Whether it is tried and true clickbait, click repellent, or some ponderously irrelevant third thing, the desperation for your eyeballs is equally sustained between them. They will subdue language, gag it and chain it, beat it to a pulp all for the reward of your momentary gaze. Your cognitive awareness is desirable only insofar as you are willing to spread whatever it is saying in the way it is said, which being so form-fitted to the collective mind it shouldn’t be an issue. This greases society’s wheels in ways I haven’t entirely figured out, but much of the expense of the grease is on you. The euphoria from reading what you already know about how awful someone else is seamlessly gives way to the adrenaline from reading unsolicited truths about how equally awful you are. What you can’t comprehend you can’t feel; and what you can’t feel you won’t miss. There is little writing that is truly that shocking, that provocative, or that thoughtful. And there is some charity in this. As you regain your own life, you give back the lives of those condemned to content artisanship, and who join you as equals in willful linguistic and intellectual oblivion.
Finally there is the immunity to the threat of literature. Literature does not exist, but claims to its discovery or invention are frequent and unequivocal. Nevertheless, each claim catches you unawares, and it is neither necessary nor encouraged that you take time to evaluate any one claim by your own faculties. Passion, whether of the reader for an author or of the writer for a manuscript, is the first and final judge of literary merit. As of this writing, manners do not allow for any dampening of another’s passion, no matter how just or well-intentioned. Certainly you as a literate person have known this very passion and have imposed it upon others without their express desire. This of all possible immunities will be the most decisive test of your commitment. Are you ready, truly ready, to find no distinction between Donna Tartt and John Williams? Between e.e. cummings and rupi kaur? Or between Sheila Heti and a roll of toilet paper?
I believe you are ready. In part because the world itself is preparing the way. Have you not noticed the shift? How even the broadest, most direct public verbiage is given over to non-verbal signifiers? And how even private verbiage is becoming monosyllabic before it is reduced into nothing more than memes and emojis? Certainly in a global, polyglot world it is the easiest and most satisfactory outcome. But a longterm trend should be kept in mind. The optimists will tell you this is nothing more than the arc toward Idiocracy. The more realistic view is that of our resignation to communication breakdown as the norm. Language succumbs more and more to obscure and untrustworthy idiolects. Criticism is deflected, emotions are stifled, information is garbled. Our range of options for necessary verbal exchange is narrowed. What form of communication succeeds this one is not for me to say, but clearly adoptive illiteracy will become a convention of the transition. And as someone ahead of the curve, you will be relied upon to teach others how to unlearn.
Why you? Because you’ve already started on this path. Your drift, like all momentous drifts, begins gradually. You buy fewer books and donate those you know you’ll never read; the few you keep have merely sentimental value, which will also be lost as the drift becomes more pronounced. You hit the “unsubscribe” button more frequently, you recede from your group chats, and text messages are tersely answered if answered at all. Your trajectory becomes unavoidable with the emergence of longform tweets. Every bit as inane as the traditional tweet, it is the disregard for form that strikes you, and renders the content even more vacuous than before. Vacuous yet somehow revealing. Each standard tweet could stand on top of the others as a brick in an emotional fortress; the longform tweet (which may be called “suicide tweets”) suggests a breach in the wall. How much lower you sink from there is too despairing to contemplate. But you digress.
A resolution worth committing to has more at stake than your self-improvement. Expressions must have echoes; the gifts of a change seen clearly and sought with conviction should never be hoarded. Once this essay reaches its final sentence, your transition away from who you were to whatever you hope to become begins. Cognizance will drain from you like sewage. But enough must remain to keep an important maxim in mind, at least until you know it’s taking irreversible effect: the most blissful ignorance is shared ignorance.