Dark Horizon - a race for worthless numbers?

 

As countless articles, and reality itself, have likely already made clear, the degradation of art is evident across all industries and artistic fields, and a generation raised on it is bound to develop poor references and weak critical abilities.

It’s the island metaphor in action: If someone is born on an island and never leaves it, their entire world is a narrow stretch of land, with scant fauna and flora compared to what lies beyond. Standards collapse not just because people are incapable of judgment, but because comparison disappears. When the surrounding cultural ecosystem is shallow, repetitive, or optimized for speed and consumption, it rewires what “good” even means. Given the current state of the world, replacing the island with a miniature junkyard would offer a more realistic picture.

Is the countdown to the end already running? Still using the metaphor of the island and the floating garbage dump: if you know the big world and are cast onto an island for a decade, a residual memory remains, and with it the desire for more. You can still imagine the mainland.

For those who grew up knowing only the mini-garbage dump, imagination is trained downward; aspiration begins to feel naïve. It all converges toward the question: what happens when the generation that still remembers true art disappears?

This generic, ideological turn the book market has taken does dominate the overall numbers, that much is true. And while the mass of readers has been declining, there is still hope, as the data below shows: Parents with reading habits encourage their children and close family circles to read.

The classics, and good literature, still live on and spread through them. Even if it is a minority, that hope remains a light.

You there—Dad or Mom—with a rich collection of books in your home, I’m proud of you.

I would like to stop here and say that everything is great—like buttered popcorn. But there is another barrier. Yes, people still read, but do they truly comprehend ? Do they absorb and digest the content, reflect on the page, or are they merely collecting numbers to display on social media?

“I read 100 books this year” sounds impressive, right? In reality, most people living ordinary lives are incapable of reading—and meaningfully absorbing—100 books a year.

It’s not just that—when you factor in commuting and workload, we spend more than ten hours at work; and even once we’re home, a whole host of other tasks demands our attention. When reading is pushed too far toward speed, the brain shifts into a mode of statistical prediction, anticipating what comes next instead of carefully processing what is actually there.

This is strikingly similar to a mechanism known as branch prediction, introduced in CPUs to improve performance by anticipating the future execution path of code.

“Branch prediction first appeared in the 1960s and 1970s with early pipeline processors and became a critical feature in the 1980s and 1990s as superscalar and deeply pipelined architectures emerged.”

It was not modeled on the human brain, but both systems attempt to solve the same problem: predicting the future to avoid costly delays. CPUs rely on hardware logic and statistical models; the brain relies on probabilistic neural processing.

This analogy helps explain why we sometimes misread text or “fill in the gaps.” Just as a CPU can mispredict a branch and must later correct itself, readers may imagine words, feel momentary confusion or alarm, and then reread the passage only to realize those words were never there.

We humans are limited by our knowledge, life experience, and especially our biases. When faced with ambiguity, we naturally interpret it through our deepest beliefs. This is not a flaw, it is how the brain protects what it values.

Neither CPUs nor humans are perfectly accurate. Period. Full stop. Punto final.

Assuming one actually reads, 700–800 hours a year, about two hours a day, may sound admirable, but literature is not about hitting numerical targets. It is about reflection and enrichment: broadening perspective, refining expression, and, at certain moments in life, recalling what was read, thinking it through again, and extracting something genuinely valuable from it.

Let me leave you with this final thought: you may read a book for a few hours purely for entertainment—laugh, feel a spark of excitement—and then move on unchanged. But when you engage with a book of genuine intellectual depth, it becomes part of you. It stays throughout your life as an inner companion you can return to for guidance. Your moral compass grows sharper, and your vision extends toward brighter horizons, allowing you to see not just a single tone, but the full spectrum of light.

Don’t be afraid of the number of pages—be afraid of the lack of content. Be terrified of inertia; your time is burning for nothing.