Civilization is facing an existential crisis. We have lost the habit of reading—if I had such a difficult time with digital addiction, I can only imagine what it was like for people who didn’t have the head start as a reader that I did—and that means that we lose both a capacity for deep concentration (which includes the capacity for jumping from our perspective to perceiving the world from the consciousness of others) as well as a critical continuity with the pre-digital past. These are really bad habits to lose. Anybody who’s encountered anybody below the age of, say, twenty-five will be struck at how their worldview seems to begin with the digital age, and what that means is that anybody who is older, or who has something like an ancestral memory of deep reading, has an obligation to serve as a caretaker generation, to keep the habit alive, with whatever tricks we can manage, in the dim hope that something or other will happen, that the entire culture won’t be swallowed up by social media algorithms and their A.I. successors, that somehow or other the taste and utility of reading, actual reading, will come back. Until then it’s airplane mode and timers and anything else we can think of that will force ourselves to read an actual book, and to resist the infinite allure of the infinite scroll.