Your brain is smarter than you think.
Today I want to talk about a term that has been everywhere online lately: "reading disorder," or at least what people casually call that in everyday internet language. Search for it on Xiaohongshu and you will find endless posts warning you that something is deeply wrong with you. Modern brains have been ruined by screens, they say. Short video has destroyed your attention span. If you cannot get through a book anymore, then apparently you are finished.
And once you start searching "What should I do if I have a reading problem?", you fall neatly into the next trap. Suddenly the internet has half-diagnosed you with ADHD, and before long someone is trying to sell you a class, a method, or a cure.
But what I want to say today is simple: for most of us, giving ourselves that label is a serious mistake.
What Is Fragmented Is Not Your Brain, but the Environment
People love to frighten you with statistics. In 2004, they say, the average attention span in front of a screen was two and a half minutes. By 2016, it had fallen to 47 seconds. Then they jump to a dramatic conclusion: screens themselves are making us cognitively fragmented.
But that is not quite right. A screen is just a glowing surface. What actually breaks your attention is the environment built on top of it: infinite scroll, pop-ups that refuse to leave you alone, recommendation engines optimized for advertising, and interfaces deliberately designed to interrupt thought.
As Carlo Iacono puts it in his Aeon essay:
Your inability to focus isn't a moral failing. It's a design problem. You're trying to think in environments built to prevent thinking. You're trying to sustain attention in spaces engineered to shatter it.
Elite Anxiety About Knowledge
This kind of panic about new media has happened countless times before. It is part of a recurring cultural loop: every new form of mass reading or mass entertainment is treated as proof that the public is getting stupider.
When penny dreadfuls became popular in 19th-century Britain, elites worried that young people were being corrupted. When novels first spread widely in the 18th century, some people described them as poison for the mind. History has shown again and again that these panics are not really about the collapse of reading ability. They are about elites losing control over the terms on which knowledge circulates.
The panic wasn't really about literacy declining. It was about literacy escaping elite control.
Think about your own life for a second. When you play TFT, Civilization VI, or any narrative-heavy game, you can process tens of thousands of words without much trouble. No one goes online saying: "I cannot read games anymore. What is wrong with me?" That alone should tell us something important. Your brain is still perfectly capable of handling complex language when the container is engaging enough.
From Monomodal to Multimodal
In medical terms, a real reading disability is a serious condition involving a range of difficulties across speaking, listening, reading, and writing. What most people are talking about online, however, is something quite different: the container through which they receive knowledge has changed.
For a long time, pure text was treated as the gold standard of serious learning, largely because older media ecosystems did not offer many alternatives. But that standard is also arrogant. It defines difficulty with long-form reading as an intellectual defect, even when the same person can learn effectively through audiobooks, high-quality video, diagrams, or conversation.
We haven't become post-literate. We've become post-monomodal. Text hasn't disappeared; it's been joined by a symphony of other channels.
I am not saying deep reading no longer matters. For building complex arguments, text still does something almost no other medium can fully replace. But I do reject the snobbery that says only pure text counts as serious learning.
Take the Bilibili creator Bi Yingjie, for example. The density and logical discipline of his videos surpass 99 percent of the books on the market. I am completely comfortable calling that kind of work a thesis for the new era.
Find the Right Container for Your Mind
Books have long seemed "effective" not because text has magical powers, but because books come with boundaries. They stay still. They end. They are often read in quiet places such as libraries, where attention is protected rather than continuously attacked.
Reading worked so well for so long not because text is magic, but because books came with built-in boundaries. They end. Pages stay still. Libraries provide quiet.
What modern people actually need is not to force themselves through paper books just to prove that they are still intellectually intact. What they need is to find a container that fits their own nervous system.
If reading a long article feels painful, there is nothing shameful about using AI to turn it into audio, or watching a rigorous explainer made by someone who has already done the first round of synthesis. The people with the greatest advantage in the future will not be those who stubbornly cling to one medium. They will be the ones who can move fluidly across several, while still holding on to depth.
Closing
In many cases, what people call a "reading disorder" is just a false problem manufactured to generate anxiety.
We do not need to prove our intelligence by forcing ourselves to read books in one approved way. What actually matters is whether we acquire deep knowledge. If that knowledge arrives through video, podcasts, or multimodal interaction with AI, and if it truly enters your mind, then it is yours.
Stop measuring yourself with a ruler inherited from another age. Your brain is doing better than you think.
(Some of the ideas in this essay draw on Carlo Iacono's Aeon piece, Books and screens.)