Yes, But What If Novel-Reading Is Also Mind-Numbing Pointless Distraction?

Every so often it comes up that reading — especially fiction — used to be considered the kind of mind-numbing, character-destroying, pointless distraction that we now take social media to be. But I feel like we never get to the next step: in that world view, what doesn’t count as pointless distraction?

I ask this not in the sense of “those people of the past, so wacky!” but rather in practical advice-seeking mode. If you know me, you know that I read novels pretty regularly. I don’t consider myself a big reader — there are always people out there who are reading like a book a day or even two books a week and that is never me. But I enjoy reading and I don’t enjoy most watching so yeah, for fun I often read.
 
In my experience, if there is something else you are hoping to do instead, novel reading is incredibly distracting. The other day I broke one my most inflexible rules for myself and I dipped into novel reading in the middle of the day. I was on the subway for like ten minutes and near the end of a chapter. “What’s the harm?” I asked myself.
 
That was a crash course in why I have that rule. After experiencing the easy, frictionless, pleasure of being swept along by narrative and crafted characters, the idea of turning to my philosophy writing — which is what I was supposed to be doing for the next few hours — seemed impossible — dull, dry, and difficult. What a disaster. I spent most of that afternoon as one of the many zombies in the university library: scrolling, scrolling, scrolling — all the while trying to find my way out of my browser and back to my word processing program.
 
That reminded me of the distracting power of reading, which reminded me that in our cultural moment, novel reading is often held up as the opposite of distraction — the model of sustained attention that people are getting distracted from. Those seduced by the internet get down on themselves because they can’t read books, because they get one or two pages in and they get that fidgety feeling.
 
I have experienced this phenomenon as well. If I’ve been too much on the internet, I can’t even read, never mind write, work, or do other things. But when I get back to being able to read, instead of “yay,” I’m more like “uh, what am I doing with my life?”
 
Maybe this kind of overthinking is why doing philosophy is bad for my mental health, but I find the question seriously disturbing, Like, I’m losing myself in a novel. Shouldn’t I be spending my time doing something? Being productive? Making things happen? At least being active, instead of just lying there passively absorbing someone else’s little stories?
 
Obviously, some people have had ideas about what we should really be doing, what the meaningful activities are that are not reading. How do I know this? Well - in part I know it from novels. The novels I learned this from include Victorian novels by authors like Trollope. From these books I have learned that the anti-novel people are often the pro-Christianity people: novel reading is flaky and distracting and bad for your character because what you should really be doing is Bible study or contemplation of God.
 
I am an atheist and for that reason and many others, those answers for life’s purposes aren’t going to work for me. Still, the nagging feeling persists. Why am I rereading Jane Smiley’s Moo when I could be doing something with my life?