I have been reading my whole life. I was a very eager reader all through my childhood, reading fantasy series from The Magic Tree House to Harry Potter, and comics like Donald Duck, The Adventures of Tintin, and Asterix. Growing older, I got more interested in action and sci‑fi – Alex Rider, Blackout, and The Swarm – as well as history with All Quiet on the Western Front, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, and War and Peace.
These days I like to read philosophical pieces, especially books by authors who are no longer alive — ideally not within the last fifty years. There are multiple facets to why I do that.
First, I firmly believe that a text old enough to have been carried through hundreds, if not thousands, of years must have been relevant to a substantial number of people. If nobody learned from or resonated with a piece, it wouldn’t have been copied and carried on. Naval Ravikant once said, “The older the problem, the older the solution.” I don’t restrict that to problems, but to virtually any thought: it’s quite likely you’re not the first person to have a specific thought. Surrounding myself with perspectives on what people have already thought (subjectively) benefited me.
Another reason is that nowadays I feel that most creators — and in this context, authors — don’t express what they intrinsically want and are, but rather what gets read, accepted by society, and matches its expectations. In short: attention, reach, and consequentially money. This is a bold statement, and I know it might be hard to see what I mean, so here is the mechanism: when attention can be measured quickly and turned into status or income, it creates pressure to write toward what performs.
The motives of writing were different back in the day, because there was no clear path to getting attention at scale. There was no easy way to replicate a book to thousands or millions of readers, and feedback travelled slowly. I assume that many authors wrote primarily for themselves, or for a clear and limited group of readers. With that context, I conclude that authors today are more likely to gain from their writing — money, fame, recognition, “happy readers,” i.e., extrinsic motives — whereas intrinsic motives were more prominent before. There is no obvious better or worse, but I prefer art that appears more authentic to me, and historic art often feels that way.
One could argue that those authors were alive at the time of writing and could have followed the same extrinsic motives. This is valid. My point, however, is not that they were somehow “purer”, but that they did not write under the same incentive structure we live in now. When I say they had less “stake,” I mean less pressure (and fewer opportunities) to become “somebody” through modern visibility and socially rewarded success.