As a conscientious  teen, I’m sure you’re very concerned about the  Pew Research Center survey showing  19% of adults read no books in 2012 …haha of course you’re not. You haven’t even read that article because of how busy you’ve been with your college preparation activities- in fact, you’re only skimming this column with one eye while you use the other to review your History notes while running a marathon and knitting sweaters for orphaned pandas. That’s a mistake, by the way, because while you’re momentarily distracted, another college-crazed teenager is sneaking up behind you and…oh my God, they stole your internship! They stole your super-competitive, once-in-a -lifetime internship! You’ll never get into an Ivy League school now, you’ll have to go to CCBC and live in a cardboard box, you threw your entire future away for a stupid column, what the freud is wrong with you…

   I’m sorry, that was just a little wacky columnist humor, designed to make you smile or force you into total neurological breakdown, whatever comes first. The truth is, with all that community service to do, clubs to lead, sports to play and live goats to sacrifice to the GPA Gods in a desperate attempt to get into their dream college, it’s no wonder teenagers today have less time for reading.

   It was easier in elementary school. Then, you’d read a book (something peppy, like “Alfonso the  Schizophrenic Platypus and the Magic of Heroin”) and  your parents would praise you because hey, at least you weren’t watching television again or stuffing random objects up your nose. Then they’d drive you to the library where you’d turn the name of the book into the Summer Reading Program desk and receive, say, a glow in the dark zebra keychain, which you then would stick up your nose. So, okay, it wasn’t a perfect system but at least there was clear motivation to read-parental approval and florescent ungulates.

   Nowadays, even if you can find 3.5 nanoseconds of leisure time, reading isn’t too appealing. It’s not social, and fast like Twitter. So why would anyone want to waste their time reading?

   Because life is not like the internet. We’re a generation that spends almost all our time online and we’ve gotten spoiled. Technology immobilizes us, keeping us searching for easy solutions online instead of venturing out into the world and finding our own answers.  What would America be like today if instead of organizing freedom marches; Martin Luther King had started a @SegregationProblems twitter? What if instead of inventing the lightbulb, Thomas Edison had bought cute vintage candlesticks on Ebay? What if Abraham Lincoln had read Twilight fanfiction instead of writing Moby Dick and thus winning World War Two? Is that the kind of world we want to live in?

   That’s why we must read, because books are neither quick nor easy. They’re full of archetypes to decode, paradoxes to comprehend, allusions to catch and characterization to analyze. They’re confusing, unclear, and strange, but they force you to really think about their message more than 3000 informative webpages ever would.  Books train us to focus, unscramble, analyze. Books are like cerebral Stairmasters that transform us into Olympic caliber cogitators, while technology is like brain Burger King- leaving our opinions out of shape and our inferences flabby. So even though reading might seem pointless now, in the future, the people changing the world will not be the ones with the million extracurriculars but the people with the craziest, smartest, best ideas-and nothing turbocharges your ideas like a good book.  Now aren’t world changing abilities a worthy reward for a few hours of reading?