I would agree with one part of that, and strongly disagree with the rest.
Yes, of course two pages is better than no pages. Yes, easy, gripping books are a smart place to start. Yes, people should drop the idea that reading has to be worthy or educational. On that, we agree.
Where I part company is this comforting claim that nothing deeper is happening, that you have merely become “unused” to reading, as if the past fifteen years of attention engineering have had no meaningful effect on how people experience boredom, effort, and reward.
That is much too naïve.
These platforms are not neutral amusements. They are precision-built behavioural products. Their designers test, measure, optimise and refine every feature to increase engagement. Infinite scroll, variable rewards, autoplay, notifications, algorithmic novelty, social approval loops, outrage bait, parasocial intimacy, all of it is there for a reason. To say this does not reshape the texture of attention is like saying a diet of ultra-processed food does not affect appetite because, after all, you can still eat an apple if you try hard enough.
You can recover the capacity for deep reading, absolutely. I am not arguing for fatalism. I am arguing against minimisation. If someone says, “I used to read books and watch films, and now my mind keeps reaching for short bursts of stimulation instead”, the correct response is not to pretend this is merely a quaint lapse in habit. It is a predictable result of sustained exposure to powerful attention traps.
And this matters because the solution follows from the diagnosis.
If the problem is just that you are out of practice, then a few thrillers and a bit of self-discipline should sort it out.
If the problem is that your attentional environment has been systematically colonised, then the answer has to include environmental change. Less phone time is not just a nice idea. It is the central intervention. You do not beat an addiction to compulsive novelty simply by placing a paperback on the coffee table and hoping your better angels prevail.
So by all means, start small. Read two pages. Pick a thriller. Make it pleasurable. But do not let the language of moderation obscure the real issue: a great many people are not failing to read because they are lazy or out of practice. They are failing to read because they live in a machine designed to make reading feel intolerably slow.