The other day, I was at a bookstore.
A soft joy —
surrounded by shelves filled with forgotten friends,
the scent of ink and stories lingering in the air,
the soft rustle of pages waiting to be held.
But the aisles stood empty.
No curious eyes, no eager hands.
Just silence.
Beautiful… but lonely.
There was a time when people said,
Books are a man’s best friend.
Pages whispered secrets,
Characters became companions,
And the smell of a new book felt like home.
But today,
It seems social media holds that place.
Thanks to the glow of a screen,
We no longer need company —
Our phones are enough.
Scroll. Tap. Swipe. Repeat.
Even in a crowded metro,
Eyes are glued to reels that vanish in seconds,
While books that last lifetimes lie untouched.
When I wrote a book,
I thought the real challenge would be getting people to buy it.
But that wasn’t it.
Buying wasn’t the concern.
Reading was.
No one has time to flip pages anymore.
To breathe in the scent of fresh paper,
To pause and feel a story seep into their soul.
People can spend hours scrolling through content
they won’t remember tomorrow,
But hesitate to spend ten minutes with a book
that might change their perspective forever.
Maybe I’m old school.
Maybe I still believe in underlining lines that feel like truth.
In crying over fictional endings
and dog-earing pages I want to come back to.
Maybe that’s why I feel lost
when I go off track —
because my heart still finds its rhythm
between paragraphs and poetry.
But I wonder —
Have we really evolved… or just distracted ourselves better?
Reels can entertain.
But can they heal you the way a book does? 📖✨
What do you think —
Is this just nostalgia,
or is something truly being lost?
