What happened to the people who actually read books?

Three months ago I noticed something strange about a meeting I was sitting in. Eight senior people, six different industries, one strategic question. Nobody in the room had a reference point older than six months. Not in a stupid way. In a brittle way — the kind that means a single news cycle could swing the entire room.

I'd spent the weekend with Reinhart and Rogoff. I felt like I was speaking a slightly different language than everyone else. I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since.

I'm not romantic about books. I don't think reading non-fiction is virtuous. I think reading deeply is a particular cognitive habit — slow, patient, willing to be wrong for a few hundred pages — and that habit has become genuinely rare in the kind of work I do.

None of the people in that room were stupid. They were synthesising fast, making good calls within the time horizon they had access to. The problem wasn't intelligence. It was that the time horizon itself had collapsed.

When I tried to introduce something from Reinhart and Rogoff — a fairly mainstream financial-history reference — I felt the room calibrate. Not hostile, just unfamiliar. Like I'd brought a cassette to a meeting full of phones. The reference didn't land because there was no shared older archive to land on.

I keep coming back to the question of what we lose. Not the specific facts in any specific book. Something more like the texture of being able to think across decades. A memory longer than the news cycle. The kind of imagination that takes seriously that things were different before, will be different again, and that the present is not the only thing that has ever been the case.

I don't have a fix for this. I just want to name it. The next time you're in a senior-room making a strategic decision, ask yourself: what's the oldest reference point in the room? If the answer is six months, that should worry you more than whatever you're deciding.