Most of my friends, and colleagues don’t read. Don’t ask me to find better friends, they are actually really cool, they just don’t read. This is a social problem. A shift happened, pulling people away from books, and towards screens, and YADA-YADA. You know the drill. But this isn’t about people who don’t read. Among my acquaintances, family, and friends, very few read fiction. More people read non‑fiction.

I have nothing against people who read non-fiction, there are plenty of non-fiction books that are genuinely useful. But my rant is not about that. Among people like me, and especially younger people, there has been a strong rise of a hustle culture. Along with that came the “use all your time productively” bullshit. Use your time to read became a common message. But since this is intertwined with the hustle culture, the books those people recommend are mostly psychology or self-help garbage. Many of these books are half-baked, backed by pseudoscience, or have no scientific support at all (special shout out to the If Books Could Kill podcast for educating me about many of them). I have nothing against the authors, or the books (for now). My anger is when people pit these books against fiction.

Back when I was still on Instagram, there was this turn your life around challenge (The name was something else that I don’t remember). The idea was very simple, and kind of good. You do a bunch of tasks every day, and post about the completion on your Instagram stories. The tasks were same every day, and was supposed to build a habit. Things like wake up early, drink x liters of water, exercise for x minutes, and so on. Kind of a checklist. One of the task was to read 5 pages a day. To most readers, five pages a day feels like nothing, but trust me, for people who don’t have the habit, and spent most time on their phone, it is very hard. My issue wasn’t the page count. The instructions specifically said to read five pages of non-fiction. Every post, or comment section, where people discussed this, had a bunch of people recommending the same self-help books to each other. Again I don’t have problem with people reading these books, or the books themselves.

My issue starts when well-intentioned people start doing these tasks differently, i.e., instead of reading non-fiction, they say they read fiction, and people, the people on the internet, bash them. A string of comments on how non-fiction is way better because it teaches life lesson, actually gives us values, and is not just for entertainment like fiction. No value you say. No life lesson you say. Deep breath. Okay. I will explain just the top four values (personal opinion of course) out of many, I think fiction provides. Here goes

My favorite thing about fiction is it always puts us in someone else’s point of view. Some books use one POV, others use multiple. Good authors make us understand the proper reasoning behind each character’s decision by taking us inside their thoughts. We get a front row seat to their decision-making, in a way that other media rarely provide. Fiction teaches us empathy. The more we read fiction, the better we become at identifying and understanding people, not just in books, but in real life. We notice the complexity in people who may seem to lead simple lives.

One of my favorite book series is The Stormlight Archive. A main character, Kaladin has taught me more about resilience, and shouldering responsibility than anyone, or anything else. I could read about those topics in a self-help book with the examples from authors life repeated over, and over, but nothing makes me understand them like growing with the same character across five books, roughly a thousand pages each. We see Kaladin’s dilemmas, and self-doubt. The ways he fails to overcome obstacles repeatedly, how that shapes him. Even when everything happens in a fantasy world, we feel relatability, and we feel connection to our lives. That, I can assure you, isn’t something you get from a self-help book.

Movies and TV can do the first two things well, but fiction books are unparalleled at firing our imagination. Through description alone they make us build a vivid picture of characters and worlds inside our head. I can still close my eyes, and rewatch scenes from some of my favorite books, scenes I’ve never seen, only imagined, but they are etched in my mind like movie clips. I created those moments from a few words. Fiction makes us more creative and expands our imagination.

One of the best books I read last year was I Who Have Never Known Men. It puts us in an intensely complex situation. Exactly the kind of “what if” scenarios fiction excels at. Even if we don’t consciously dwell on them, these scenarios boost our counterfactual thinking, which often helps us make better real-life decisions.

The above four point should be the enough to sell the idea of reading fiction. The escape, or the creativity boost it provides, how it helps manage stress, or even increase our thinking skills, and so on are just more, and more points to add on top of these.

So I think you should read more fiction. Sincerely, a fiction book lover.