In theory, I should be reading all the time, every day. But reality isn’t like that. Sometimes you’re depressed, and sometimes you’re going through something emotionally that zaps all of your desire for art.
Got A Reading Problem? Ask The Book Doctor! by Kelsey McKinney for Defector
A couple days ago I was on Defector after a fediverse mutual had shared an article about Bitcoin. I didn’t end up reading the article about Bitcoin because quite frankly I am tired of thinking about the cryptocurrency bros and have been for a long while. I am sure the article is fantastic, I just don’t want to read thousands of words about Bitcoin at this point in my life.
Instead, I went browsing around the site for something else to read. Defector is a site that I am aware exists but is not one I read regularly. An article by Kelsey McKinney regarding someone’s reading problem caught my eye. More specifically, the couple sentences I quoted at the top of this blog post.
I have been experiencing this phenomenon since the beginning of this year. The particular form of depression I have been afflicted with recently has meant that my enjoyment and appreciation of all kinds of art has dropped off a cliff. This applies even to art forms I am generally appreciative of even during times of ennui in the past – music & video games. Books seem to have been the only art form that is somewhat immune to this particular mental debuff.
In book reader communities, one often hears the term “reading slump” to describe a form of burnout where one just does not enjoy reading anymore. So you’ll often see book video creators talk about “books to get you out of a reading slump” and so on. Along those lines I want to describe this phenomenon as the art slump. Same idea as the reading slump, just applied to other art forms.
Back to my particular situation – I have not enjoyed a video game this year so far. I played Assassin’s Creed: Shadows earlier this year which mostly left a sense of emptiness within me. I have not found any other video games this year that I really connect with emotionally. The only game I play regularly is Threes on my Steam Deck to wind down before bed; there is no strong emotional connection to Threes. It is a purely utilitarian engagement which is fine if it was part of a wider and deeper engagement with video games but as a sole method of interacting with video games I find it rather unfulfilling.
Music has been a similar void. I am generally someone who likes to listen to albums front-to-back combined with listening to KEXP for the purposes of music discovery and companionship. I just haven’t found any album this year that resonated with me until just yesterday (2025-06-05). I have been wanting to write something for my music blog this year but this art slump has left me uninspired and with a sense of ennui about my enjoyment of music.
I don’t have a solution for this problem, I don’t think there is one solution for this problem as the problem is personal and as such will vary from person to person. For me, I think this a offshoot of seasonal depression that has persisted past the cold dark days of winter. At this point I am optimistic that I am slowly starting to emerge out of this fog. The fact that I am even writing this blog post is a good sign that things are improving.
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