Pillar · 11 of 12
Read
Yes / no, once a day
Note: Each of these pillars is personal, one of the things that make you you, so I'd recommend changing their contents. I'll keep what I write about the pillars short.
"The Read pillar"
I'm one of those lunatics too: the ones who open an antique book, sniff the inside and study its yellowed pages up close. My attention, my focus and the shape of my mind, which all these foxfulness exercises are trying to repair, don't really let me sit down and read a book for an hour without a break right now. Still, that doesn't stop me feeling safe and at peace, as long as I have a pen, some paper and a book beside me.
Research
Research: Read
Book reading and longevity, the disputed empathy finding, flow, and the reading brain on screens.
These notes are a starting point for the author's own reading; nothing here is medical advice.
A twelve-year follow-up of more than 3,600 older adults found that people who read books lived longer than those who did not, after adjusting for wealth, education and health (Bavishi, Slade and Levy 2016). The claim that literary fiction improves the ability to read other people's minds made headlines (Kidd and Castano 2013) and then ran into trouble: a larger replication did not find the effect (Panero and colleagues 2016), so it is best treated as open. The pillar logic of the manifesto, an activity that absorbs you completely, is Csikszentmihalyi's concept of flow (1990). On the author's difficulty with reading for an hour, Wolf (2018) describes how reading on screens changes the reading brain and how deep reading can be rebuilt.
References
- Bavishi, A., Slade, M. D., and Levy, B. R. (2016). A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity. Social Science & Medicine.
- Kidd, D. C., and Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science.
- Panero, M. E., and colleagues (2016). Does reading a single passage of literary fiction really improve theory of mind? An attempt at replication. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
- Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. Harper & Row.
- Wolf, M. (2018). Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. Harper.
Notes last touched October 16, 2026