Prof. Dr. Firat Kurt
This is in response to an opinion article titled “Death of Deep Reading and the Rise of Pseudo-Intellectuals” published in daily The Public Purview as of 20th of September, 2026. There is much in the article which seems quite agreeable. Just as the distinction between information and understanding is important, so too is the distinction between having access to information and actually possessing knowledge. Rapidly scanning—or, more accurately, merely glancing through—texts on social media and the internet, followed by the constant stream of notifications arriving on our phones and computers, and the resulting habit of jumping rapidly from one subject to another without establishing a connection with what we are reading, may weaken our capacity for sustained attention and thought. However, one very important dimension seems to be missing from this discussion. No generation is shaped solely by characteristics of its own. Every generation carries the economic, cultural, moral and psychological traces of those that came before it. Moreover, every generation bears the imprint not only of the preceding generation, but also of the elites—both of its own time and of earlier generations—who possess the power to shape the world. In this context, before asking why Generation Z reads less deeply, why it appears impatient, why it gravitates towards immediate gratification, or why it struggles to commit to long-term goals, we first need to understand what kind of world previous generations prepared for them and what kind of world today’s global elites envision for them.
Beginning with my own generation, like many other parents, we urged our children to succeed. You must succeed! One goal! One world! A narrow universe that leaves little room for anything else in human life. Much like the cold, colourless, enormous prison that global elites are trying to create, where those individuals who are “permitted” to live will be kept under control.
What drove us to do this was the influence of our own parents and the experiences to which we ourselves had been exposed while growing up. If you do not study, you will never get a good job! If you do not succeed, you will suffer terribly in life! Quite apart from the cold of winter and the heat of summer, you will have to confront humanity in its rawest form and curse every day you live. These were the thoughts that shaped our mindset and motivation. If we did everything right, our children would not have to endure the hardships we had endured.
But we did something else as well. We removed as many obstacles from their path as we could, tried to provide them with opportunities our own parents had been unable to provide us, glorified success, encouraged competition and immersed them in the language of personal development: Succeed. Distinguish yourself. Fulfil your potential. Become the best version of yourself. Compete with yourself. Remember, if you lose, you are defeated—and defeat tastes bitter.
Then we sent them into a world in which the traditional relationship between ‘effort’ and ‘reward’ had become increasingly uncertain. We told them that education would lead to employment, employment to independence, work to prosperity, prosperity to home ownership, and adulthood, ultimately, to marriage, children and security. For families like ours living in developing countries, these were the brightest and most beautifully packaged dreams we could offer our children.
We never considered the influence of the past and present elites who presented this world to us. In fact, they were the architects of these narrow dreams. While God made this world a difficult place for human beings—and I say this within the framework of a religious understanding—the elites to whom He granted time, opportunity and abundance turned this world, for millions of people, into a place of distraction shaped by economic hardship and economic crises. Moreover, as technology advanced, the architects of a system capable of controlling every aspect of life—the global elites—progressively narrowed the economic space and sphere of freedom available to ordinary people while expanding those same spaces for themselves as far as possible.
It was amid precisely this turmoil that artificial intelligence emerged: on the one hand, confining the masses within an increasingly monitored society directed by algorithms; on the other, presenting human labour and human intellect to the marketplace as increasingly devalued and replaceable commodities. Thus, alongside economic insecurity, younger generations have been forced to witness that what they were taught about the rule of law, justice and the value of human life was, in reality, a utopia.
Since the subject of the article is an attempt to understand why a generation does not want to read, I do not believe there is much point in extending these examples further. In my feeble view, we cannot understand people’s attitudes towards the future independently of the trust they place in the justice of the world they inhabit, its institutions and the promises made to them. Our era began as one that sang the praises of freedom, work, labour and the rule of law, yet it has continued as a period in which the things we were promised have been taken away from us one by one and we ourselves have been turned into experimental subjects. Neither Generation Z nor Generations X and Y believe that the average individual—or a society composed of largely passive individuals—has any meaningful chance of changing this.
For us, therefore, ours is an age in which people are losing their dreams for the future, their faith in God, their trust in politicians and society, and ultimately even their trust in themselves. In such an environment, a pivotal issue concerning human nature seems increasingly important to comprehend. When people believe they cannot escape a persistent state of pain and stress, they tend to turn towards immediate and easily accessible forms of gratification in an attempt to alleviate that pain and stress. This cannot be regarded as an immutable law of psychology. However, it seems inevitable to believe that for people whose sense of control over both the present and the future has diminished, striving, working and reading in pursuit of long-term rewards becomes increasingly difficult. Therefore, if there is a way out, it lies in rebuilding the belief that human labor still holds meaning, that justice is more than mere rhetoric, that accountability is a universal standard binding on all, that human dignity cannot be reserved solely for the powerful and privileged, and that ordinary people can genuinely shape the future. Such a reconstruction can only be achieved by realigning and reshaping today’s world according to the true measure of justice. Only then can hope—and everything anchored to it—be built anew.