Reading doesn't always make you happy (nor does it need to).
BarcelonaA characteristic unique to humans is the amount of time we spend thinking about what isn't happening: the past, the future, or hypothetical situations. This type of thinking, known as mental wanderingMindfulness is considered a key capacity for learning, reasoning, and planning, but various philosophical and religious traditions suggest it can have an emotional cost. Based on this hypothesis, a team from Harvard University analyzed the relationship between mind wandering and emotional well-being in everyday life. Using a mobile app, the researchers, led by MA Killingsworth, collected real-time data from more than two thousand adults, who reported what they were doing, what they were thinking, and how they felt at that moment. The results showed that the mind wanders almost half the time, with little variation depending on the activity, and that happiness levels are lower when thoughts are not focused on the present activity. In other words, when it comes to explaining emotional well-being, what we think about is more decisive than what we are doing, and that a wandering mind, despite its cognitive value, carries a measurable emotional cost.
And what about literature? Reading involves, precisely, putting into practice that capacity to mentally shift away from the immediate present. Perhaps the issue isn't so much the digression itself as the criteria by which we measure its effects: the fact that an experience doesn't increase immediate happiness doesn't necessarily make it harmful or dispensable.
Loss, memory, and conflict
In contemporary society, happiness (understood as a subjective state of well-being) has become a central indicator, but it cannot be the sole measure of a meaningful life. Literature, in fact, has always revolved around themes that are hardly compatible with a culture oriented toward constant pleasure: loss, memory, conflict, the passage of time, death. Reading doesn't always make you feel good, nor has that ever been its ultimate goal.
Focusing on the here and now can be a useful tool when life overwhelms us and the noise prevents us from thinking with perspective. The problem arises when living exclusively in the present becomes the privileged path to well-being, or when immediate happiness becomes the horizon to pursue. A person focused solely on managing their current emotional state is politically deactivated and, consequently, more vulnerable and exposed to the interests of others. As I already warned Erich FrommFreedom does not consist of getting rid of all burdens, but rather, in assuming one's own decisions and responsibilities.
In the collection of essays The wave in the mind (Green Ray), Ursula K. Le Guin He defends imagination as a political tool: only by imagining other worlds is it possible to question the apparent inevitability of the world we inhabit. Today, that capacity seems more necessary than ever. Perhaps the challenge, in the end, is not to prevent the wandering mind, but to decide where and why we let it wander.
