M.

“I hate how summer kills me when it appears even briefly.”

Hearing a book takes away the friction of visually decoding and processing. While listening, you are going at the narrative pace of the author. Some may claim they stop and take notes, but this isn’t the default behavior the medium encourages. There’s a reason the author wrote the book rather than merely narrating it and releasing it only on audio. Friction is the point of reading. There is no difficulty without friction, making the argument absurd on its face if one considers what ‘difficult’ might mean.

Our insistence on collapsing the distinction between the two is a tendency evident in many areas: we want the identity of being a disciplined person without the effort to cultivate it. I hosted a discussion on Brave New World a few weeks ago, and the idea of doing hard things came up because the World State is one in which people are conditioned against difficulty. The removal of friction is the point, because it makes the population easy to control. The people in the room were clearly aware that they weren’t doing hard things, and that a good life requires doing something difficult even if you’re not world-renowned at it. The good life requires working toward mastery of something, whether in your professional life or in some other craft. You need to introduce meaningful friction into the process.

The fact that the burden of proof is on me to prove that hearing and reading are distinct, rather than on those who are collapsing the distinction between the two, says something. We treat effort hierarchies as illegitimate unless they can be empirically proven beyond doubt (do you have a study for that?). We punish those who put in more effort by calling them elitist or ableist (two charges I am sure to receive). I have to downplay the fact that I read many difficult texts because it’s considered haughty to insist that hearing and reading aren’t the same. I’m creating a hierarchy of effort, which the professional class generally doesn’t like. They are confronted by the fact that they’re not doing the thing they claim to be doing. The social signals are all scrambled: you can signal seriousness by putting in less effort. So why would anyone put in more effort privately if the payoff is the same? And the payoff is identical because we have made it socially acceptable to collapse the distinction between listening and reading, or generally between two activities requiring differential effort.