Is anyone reading or is everyone watching videos?

Creatix / October 9, 2025

The center of attention gravity has shifted hard toward video.

• In time use, TV/video still dominates U.S. leisure: the BLS finds Americans spend ~2.6 hours/day watching TV, while reading for personal interest is far lower and skews older (teens average ~9 minutes/day; 75+ average ~46 minutes). (Bureau of Labor Statistics)

• People are still reading books, just less time overall: Pew has long found a solid majority report reading at least one book in the past year (historically ~3 in 4 adults), even as digital habits rise. (Pew Research Center)

• Audio is the reading-adjacent format growing fastest: U.S. audiobook revenue jumped ~13% in 2024 to ~$2.22B; e-books also ticked up. (Homepage)

• Younger audiences are especially video-first (YouTube/TikTok), and sizeable shares now get news directly on those platforms. (AP News)

• Outside the U.S., the pattern’s similar: UK data show shrinking broadcast TV but huge overall video use; separate polling found many adults didn’t read a book in the past year. (Ofcom)

Bottom line

Reading isn’t dead—it’s becoming more intentional (often via print + audiobooks), while casual downtime flows to algorithmic video. If you want to read more without “fighting” video, pair formats (print for depth + audio for commutes) and set tiny daily targets (e.g., 10 pages or 15 minutes). If you're a writer, don't even try to compete with video, especially the short length / highly addictive variety. 

Short video is engineered candy for the brain. It’s bright, crunchy, and endlessly refillable from one swipe to the next. If you're a writer, don't try to compete with video; it's impossible to beat it. TikTok and the other platforms offer an infinite bowl of sweets where every swipe promises a new texture: sour, chewy, popping, caramelized. Social media platforms are structured around micro-rewards that trigger fast dopamine spikes. Each video clip is a sugar cube; the algorithm is your private confectioner, calibrating sweetness to your palate in real time. 

By contrast, written content is like a salad. It’s crisp and you have to do the chewing and savoring. It doesn’t melt in your mouth like the decadent desserts offered by video. You bring your taste buds along with your patience, imagination, prior knowledge, and attention. In a marketplace that defaults to instant dessert, a boring healthy salad never wins the popularity contest. And that’s okay. Because salad doesn’t exist to beat candy. It exists to nourish winners. 

Candy Wins the Crowd

Let’s be honest about incentives. Short video compresses the “hook → hit → next” cycle into seconds. The medium can be brilliant and moving, but the dominant loop is physiological first and narrative second: scan, spike, repeat. This loop scales because it’s easy to start and hard to stop. If “attention is the product,” then hyper-palatable micro-content is the product-market fit.

Writing is metabolically expensive. Readers must co-create the story or narrative they're reading. They must hold images, resolve ambiguity, and bridge gaps in the "boring" written media. The cost filters the audience. The masses will always choose convenience in the path of least resistance. Let the masses be the masses. Let them chase their dopamine loops. That is part of democracy and unfortunately many have to fail for some to rise. 

Different Qualities and Outcomes

Reading strengthens precisely what video shortcuts: depth, inference, memory consolidation, long-form patience. Like walking, writing and reading develop muscles that watching videos will atrophy. Not because video is bad, but because it offers a different quality spectrum optimized for attention and sometimes education. Writing can be optimized for higher quality edification.   

“Quality,” of course, like beauty can be subjective. Some days you want a quiet stroll; other days you want a mountain hike. Sometimes you crave a dense essay; sometimes a breezy newsletter. The key is that you choose the terrain rather than letting the terrain choose you. Reading lets you set the pace. Video sets it for you.

Don't Write for the Masses; They won't read it.

If candy videos control the mass market, trying to outdo them with written content is a losing game. Writers who chase the crowd end up sanding down their edges until nothing cuts. Don’t chase. Narrow. The audience for writing—especially writing that matters—has always been a self-selecting minority that trades velocity for textured quality.

But here’s the trap: “niche writing” can morph into pandering just as quickly as “mass writing.” If you write for a niche, you can end up optimizing for what they want to hear, performing a version of yourself for approval. That’s still a candy loop, just a smaller bowl.

The alternative is what we can call the niche of you. Write the work only you can write—what you actually know, what you’re actively learning, what’s genuinely bothering you or lighting you up. Don’t reverse-engineer yourself from an imagined reader. Write forward from your own curiosity. Let people discover your inner channel or not. Your job is not to add to the noise, but rather to keep the signal clean.

“But Will It Pay?”

Probably not. The market’s a weather system: sometimes it rains on deserts and leaves forests dry. If your writing’s primary purpose is a predictable paycheck, then yes, you’ll have to make compromises that align you with the sugar economy. Many people do, and there’s no shame in that. But if your writing’s primary purpose is personal clarity, craft, conversation with the dead and the unborn, then your KPI is different: Did you grow the muscle? Did you say the true thing? Did you become the person who could write that sentence for future generations to enjoy?

This doesn’t mean hiding from readers. It means treating readers as friends rather than customers, fellow walkers who choose to lace up.

Walking vs. Cars

Trying to compete with video on its own terrain is like trying to outrun a car on foot. The car is built for speed. You are built for movement. They win the race. You win the life. Even in cities and suburbs of perfectly efficient cars, we still need to walk because walking is not only transport. It is health, mood regulation, and time to think. Reading and writing are the mental equivalents: slow transport that builds internal infrastructure.

So enjoy the walk. Notice the temperature of the air and the grain of the sidewalk; the sentence rhythm, the surprising metaphor, the idea that blooms two pages later. Let the video traffic roar by. The point is not to arrive first; it’s to enjoy the journey and arrive whole even if you are walking in circles around your own neighborhood of thoughts and ideas becoming tools and ideals.

How to Practice the Writing "Walk"

• Disregard external attention. Write and read when you can bring your best inward attention, not your desire for leftover external attention.

• Follow the live question. If you’re genuinely learning while you write, the prose carries energy that algorithmic optimization can’t fake.

• Accept uneven terrain. Some essays are flat loops in the park; others are steep climbs. Both count. Not every piece must be Everest.

• Publish with clean hands. Share because it’s done and you’re ready to let it go, not because you’re starving for the next hit of approval.

• Invite, don’t chase. Tell people where you’re walking. Some will follow. Most won’t. That’s not a failure; that’s a filter. If the masses are not into your unique art yet, that's okay.  

The Quiet Counterculture

There’s a modest, stubborn counterculture growing at the edges of the feed—a community of walkers. They still sample candy; they’re not ascetics. But they cultivate an appetite for green veggies and fulfilling meals. They are looking to consume ideas that don’t dissolve, sentences that ask them to work for reward. They are not “the masses,” and they probably never will be. That’s fine. Cultures that last rarely start as majorities.

If you’re a writer, write to you, consistently enough that your path becomes legible to others. Let them decide whether the path you're setting is worth the walk for them. Let them leave, and let them return. You keep moving.

Final Word

In an economy that rewards speed and spectacle, writing is the stubborn, healthy alternative: the undressed salad and the daily walk. It will never taste like a fun-size candy bar, and it shouldn’t. The point isn’t to “win” against video; it’s to cultivate an inner life that cannot be binge-watched. Write what you know, write what you’re learning, write what you can’t not write. Then close the tab, put on your shoes, and go for a walk. If others join, wonderful. If not, you still got where you needed to go.

Now you know it.

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