Oct 31, 2025 — Morning at McDonald’s
A hypothesis: literature helps us live a richer life — because it lets us see the world through other people’s thoughts.
The author of the essay I read today gave a different answer: “to stay sane in today’s world.”
That line stuck with me.
I’ve just finished reading it, and honestly, I’m not sure whether literature is useful in any practical sense. Still, I want to believe that it is.
The author shared how reading Mishima Yukio’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion in high school saved him — how, living in a rural part of Kyushu, he suddenly felt connected to someone who shared his struggles. He also wrote that lovers of literature often build a kind of invisible network across the world — people bound by the stories they’ve read and the emotions they’ve shared.
I felt the same once with Yokomichi Yonosuke — a novel about an ordinary man’s uneventful life. I loved it deeply. I even recommended it to my girlfriend at the time, but she never got past the first page. I remember feeling strangely lonely about that. Maybe if I’d had even one friend online who wanted to talk about that book, something in me might have changed.
In that sense, literature connects us through shared stories. It helps us interpret the world through someone else’s narrative — and that, I think, makes it useful after all.
But maybe the question of “usefulness” itself is misplaced. “Value” and “utility” aren’t the same thing. Something can have value simply because it resists being useful.
In Japan, since around 2024, the terms “cost performance” and “time performance” — コスパ and タイパ — have become everyday buzzwords. We’ve started to evaluate even our leisure in terms of efficiency. I can’t help but wonder: is that really the kind of life we want?
Just yesterday, I finished reading Tuesdays with Morrie, and I’ve been wrestling with questions like what it means to live, or what makes life worthwhile. My current answer is this: modern society constantly imposes invisible pressures — to earn more money, to live in the city, to achieve endlessly. We’re chasing illusions built by others, and in doing so, we become quietly exploited.
Seen from that angle, “time performance” feels hollow to me. Reading literature is one of the least time-efficient things you can do — and that’s precisely what makes it beautiful. Spending hours absorbed in a story, giving your time without expecting a return, is a deeply human act.
Maybe that’s the kind of person I want to be — someone who keeps reading even when it’s “inefficient,” someone who finds meaning in what doesn’t pay off.
This may be a messy train of thought, but I’ll end my morning blog here.
