What If Reading Is Your Full-Time Job?

“So what?” This was the question someone asked me when I put a rather unusual question before him: “What if reading is your full-time job?” He looked at me for a moment, perhaps wondering what kind of job I was talking about. 

A job normally means an office, a desk, meetings, targets, deadlines and, of course, a salary at the end of the month. But what if your job were simply to read? You wake up in the morning, make your coffee or tea, open a book and begin your working day.

Our conversation moved on, but the question remained with me. Imagine being paid not to sell, manage, audit or produce something, but to sit with some of the greatest mind’s humanity has produced. Today you spend a few hours with Friedrich Nietzsche. Tomorrow, you walk through the world of Leo Tolstoy. Another morning you listen to the poetry of Ahmed Shawqi, and in the afternoon, you argue silently with Karl Marx. What kind of person would you become after doing this every day?

Reading, in that sense, would no longer be a hobby. It would become an occupation of the mind. Your office would have no fixed walls. One day you would be in nineteenth-century Russia, walking through Tolstoy’s world of morality, family, war and human contradiction. Another day Nietzsche would disturb your comfortable assumptions and force you to ask questions you had avoided asking yourself. Ahmed Shawqi would remind you that sometimes poetry can explain a nation, a human emotion or an entire age more beautifully than pages of analysis. Marx would take you into question of labour, capital, class and power, whether you agreed with him or not.

And this is perhaps one of the greatest benefits of serious reading. You do not have to agree with the person you are reading. You only have to be willing to enter his or her mind for a while. A reader can spend Monday with a socialist, Tuesday with a capitalist, Wednesday with a poet, Thursday with a psychologist and Friday with a novelist. By the weekend, perhaps the reader has more questions than answers. But is that necessarily a bad thing? Sometimes intellectual growth begins not when we find an answer, but when we discover a better question.

Then there is fiction. We sometimes speak of novels as if they are merely entertainment. I disagree. A good novel may teach us something that an economics textbook, management manual or philosophical lecture cannot. Through fiction, we enter another person’s fear, poverty, ambition, loneliness, love, failure and hope. We temporarily live a life that is not ours. Non-fiction gives us facts, arguments, history and theories, while fiction gives those things a human face.

If reading were your full-time job, imagine the knowledge accumulated after one year. Imagine after five years. Imagine after twenty. But knowledge itself is not enough. A person may read a thousand books and still understand very little about life. The real question is what happens to knowledge after it enters us. Do we question it? Do we compare it with experience? Do we challenge the author? Do we change our minds when the evidence demands it? And most importantly, does reading make us more capable of understanding people who do not think like us?

Knowledge can become a weapon, but I do not mean a weapon used against others. I mean a weapon against ignorance, manipulation, narrow thinking and intellectual dependency. A person who reads widely becomes more difficult to imprison inside a single idea. Perhaps this is why reading is such a strange occupation. The more seriously you do it, the more you realise how much you do not know. Every book opens another door, and behind that door are ten more doors.

So, what if reading really were your full-time job? Perhaps you would never become rich from it. Perhaps nobody would promote you. There might be no impressive designation to place under your name. But every morning you would report for duty to one of the largest workplaces ever created—the accumulated human mind. And at the end of each working day, your salary would be something that no employer could take back from you: knowledge.