I really hate how I feel under pressure to do millions of things

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I really hate how I feel under pressure to do millions of things at the same time in millions of different ways. But one of those things is reading. I hate how you're told by the pseudo intellectual masses that you have to read shitloads of "classic" books and are forced to claim you found them entertaining and filled with "profound psychological and philosophical insights".

Firstly, books and reading books all the way through (in contrast with reading as a means to an end, e.g., reading a physics equation) no longer even encompass the huge majority of intellectual activity. 1000 years ago you would be known as a huge genius if you were literate, read the bible, and made up your own 5000 page segment of unfalsifiable theology where you try to work out whether god approves of lightly salted pretzels. These days we have the bullshitty, unfalsifiable philosophising strands of intellectual activity. We also have programming, mathematics, chemistry, and many other things. Stop telling me that reading books all the way through is the only way to be intelligent or do intelligent things.

Stop pretending that the huge, huge majority of books can't be summarised. I hate how "erudition" is praised and I'm threatened with exile if I don't constantly read. It's ironic how erudition is praised by people who love seeming like curmudgeons who want to live back in Ancient Greek or Roman or Medieval times "when scholars weren't so narrowly focused and could grasp the complexities of life, in contrast with out simplistic scientists and so called intellectuals these days, such as Stephen Hawking". Of course it's ironic because erudition is like aspiring to be a really fucking dumb and basic computer database. Beep boop! There are 27 moons of Saturn! Did you know Proust's third novel had 27 deaths? Did you know the Ancient Macedonians worshipped 729 types of cat-like Gods and 729 is 27^2? What's that, you want me to use the information in a non-trivial manner? I'm just a database. Boop beep!

This isn't just non-fiction, it's also fiction where the pseuds are out in full force. Fiction was most likely originally written for fun. These days, "fun" and "enjoyment" are dirty words for the pseudo-intellectuals. All the classic novels are supposedly filled with "profound psychological and philosophical insights". Novels these days are supposed to facilitate an English professor's activity of making unfalsifiable, post hoc inferences or playing spot the allusion. Even though everyone today is supposedly too stupid to know what a good novel is, every surviving novel ("which stood the test of time" supposedly) first had to survive by having some measure of popularity in its own time, where everyone had an IQ of 200.

You can't just call something boring these days and stop reading it. You have to claim that the author's understanding of Sanskrit linguistics as applied to the design of chewing gum wrappers was deficient.