Whether it's a few pages on the train commute or a quiet chapter at a café table, Singapore wants its citizens to rediscover an increasingly rare habit: sitting down and reading. This month, the city-state launched a novel five-year national campaign to nurture reading, complete with an incentive rarely seen in public policy, small cash payments to citizens who log their reading minutes on a government platform, CNN reported.
The bet, officials say, is that gamifying reading — tracking it with a points system for a modest reward and a dash of public participation can help revive a habit steadily being edged out by doomscrolling and what's now widely known as "brain rot." The term, describing the perceived mental fog from overconsuming shallow online content, was coined by Henry David Thoreau in his 1854 book Walden, but shot into modern vocabulary after Oxford University Press named it its 2024 Word of the Year, citing a 230% surge in usage that year.
