toxic productivity, parameciums, and other reading advantures.

I should probably start with a small confession.
I am not a scholar. I'm not a literature student, and I don't have a structured academic background in any of this.
I just really love reading.

For most of human history, only a tiny slice of society could read. Everyone else was busy surviving, making children, fixing roofs, or polishing those ridiculous glass cabinets with one lonely book inside.
Reading was a niche hobby, and elite, eccentric, deeply personal practice reserved for the curious, the lonely, the imaginative, and oddballs.
The crisis, I've realized, does not come from a decline in intelligence, It comes from something far more shocking... modern society finally invited "stupidity" into the reading community.
We actually print books for EVERY type of brain. Even the unserious ones, even the impatient ones, even gloriously "stupid" ones, and for the first time, in our existence "idiots" are reading. If you just look 30 years ago it was almost impossible to find  this amount of people reading, but now we have same amount of people complaining "it used to be so much better, the literature had a standard" Now-Now!
That's not cultural decline, that's democratization!!!
The "bad books" flooding the market aren't replacing the good ones; they're simply sitting proud beside them, louder and glitter covered.
The masterpieces still exist, they're just harder to spot und the avalanche of fanfic-smut, and dragon-mating fantasies, and enemies to lovers written during someone's lunch break. Where the literature student heroine is saying holy cow, 4 times per page. 
But this is how literacy grows. For the first time, "idiots" are reading. This is not an insult, it's an achievement of civilization, we expanded literacy so widely that even those who never touched a book thirty years ago now have entire genres designed for them. 
People start with five silly books, sometimes fifty silly books... and one day BOOM they pick up something meaningful. A spark catches, a brain opens, a reader is born... or they wander like tourist without map into Dostoevsky read 3 pages leave one star reviews "about to many thoughts" but this people were never meant to read... were they?
And meanwhile, the numbers of PhDs skyrockets, knowledge expands, and humanity becomes more educated than ever. 
We didn't lose intelligence, we simply broadened the audience.
The ceiling stayed high, the floor came up to meet it.
And of course we're panicking: the dragon shifter reverse-harem erotica is selling a million copies, it's like Michelin chef seeing a tiktok grilled cheese get a Nobel Prize, but the masses suddenly have power in defining what counts as a book, it actually threatens the old hierarchy... only educated elites used to read, they controlled taste, now everyone reads, so the taste becomes democratically chaotic, like emails that loosed there culture of letter, you're not getting polite letters anymore, you're just getting questions, no Subject, no name whatsoever and when you reply some of those emails will never come back to you, visibility of action... Paramecium, I wrote email, therefore I moved, no farther action needed.
Algorithms will become the new gatekeepers, and new liberators... 
Brittany with 250 books a year will tell you, she have read all those books, where in reality it was probably 200 audiobooks with speed 2.5... 
But good books will survive, because good readers survive, readers who cave complexity, humanity, philosophy, they will always find their books, they are quiet, but they are eternal.
So the punchline, no books aren't worse. Society just got bigger, and noisier, and wonderfully, chaotically inclusive. 
We haven't dumbed down, we've just grown up. 
And now there's room for everyone, from Tolstoy lovers to dragon-smut enthusiasts, in same messy, beautiful library.