> Why even read?

To understand.

For most everyone else, it is to momentarily feel some sort of way. The difference is what the parent describes as a revelation, to him.

You see, for people who crave to understand, living among people who just want to feel this and that feels like living in an insane asylum where the people inflicting harm upon themselves and others will do nothing but distract themselves long enough to forget and go on to inflict harm on themselves and others again, forever.

As for 'might as well quit' - most everyone I've known who's not an idiot has already done that. Even the idiots aren't having children by the way :) Living in a matrix pod? You mean a modern city? Anyhoo...

I've colloquially coined this as the contentification of everything. The goal isn't to actually engage with something, whether it's the writing style, flavor, or artwork on display. It's purely about consumption, and the most optimal way of consuming something is distilling it down into a short, bland summary.

It's why there are people out there that will use an LLM to summarize a book and pretend that they read the whole thing because they know the general outline.