In 2025, choosing to study literature, philosophy, and the arts is a radical act. In a world intoxicated by instantaneous AI output and endless swipes, immersing yourself in human-generated texts and thoughts isn’t an antiquarian pursuit; it’s an act of defiance.

In his 1865 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” Matthew Arnold urged us to “know the best that is known and thought in the world.” He imagined culture as a living stream — refreshing, orienting, and communal. Yet today, that current is dangerously diminished. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while 28 percent of U.S. adults read for pleasure daily in 2003, that number fell to 16 percent by 2023.

You can feel it, right? The pocketable screen incarcerates us in skull-sized prisons; the impulse to update, to “like,” to refresh diminishes our presence. Even when the Wi-Fi drops, our circuitry of attention — retrained for interruption — keeps tugging us away from each other and toward our phones.

It’s unsettling, but here lies our chance for rebellion, our chance to intentionally slow down, to dwell in the sentences of Toni Morrison, to trace the logical turns of Plato, to meditate on the sublime landscapes of Thomas Cole, to live as people, to make a genuine punk gesture.

Pursue the humanities.

I remember a moment like this as an undergraduate in Vienna. With a weekend to spare, I bought a cheap ticket and boarded the day’s last train to Budapest. Arriving after dark, I stepped into a city alive with tension: Habsburg grandeur braced against Soviet brutalism. As a tram carried me toward my hostel, I felt like a time traveler. With each pulse of the track and bloom of sparks, I sensed it: Something was coming.

In that gothic place, I was noticed by a young woman dressed entirely in black — typical for the city — save for a butterfly woven of polyester lace in her black hair. Perhaps what gave me away as a student backpacker was my dog-eared copy of Let’s Go: Budapest. Maybe it was my Cleveland ball cap.

She and I spoke haltingly in a mix of German, Hungarian, and English. We then shared an inexpensive meal of lángos, deep-fried flatbread, and she introduced herself as Andréa, a grad student in Hungarian history and culture. When I mentioned I was studying Hungarian poetry for a class in Austria, her joy was palpable. Dropping any pretense of English, she spoke rapidly while pressing into my hands a bilingual paperback of Imre Madách, whose The Tragedy of Man I’d been reading.

When I thanked her and joked that her butterfly clip was the only color I’d seen since arriving, she laughed about Soviet architecture and gave me the ornament, too. In some memories, colors preside. Others have olfactory and acoustic elements. The one of my weekend in Hungary is mostly tactile and defined by temperature: It exudes a joyful warmth.

I’m convinced that this encounter never would’ve unfolded had smartphones been glowing in our palms. Andréa and I might’ve been too busy composing Instagram-worthy shots of the tram or updating our feeds to even notice one another — parallel monologues humming on separate servers.

In hindsight, Madách’s closing words in The Tragedy of Man don’t seem so tragic: “Mondottam, ember, küzdj és bízva bízzál!” (“I have told you, Man: strive on, and trust!”) Like antiquarians before me, I’d come to Budapest seeking ruins, a museum, a curio, but I found something else: an encounter, poetry, a butterfly. This was not the melancholic city my fellow backpacking friends described as gloomy. In it, I found my own humanity and discovered someone else’s.

I also found a parable of scholarship itself, a reminder that literature, philosophy, and art are never inert archives but living presences capable of reorienting our vision. For students and seekers today, this parable can be instructive: To engage the texts and relics of culture is not to be burdened but to be drawn more fully into life.

So, here is my invitation to the wandering scholar today: If you can major in humanities or the arts, do it. If you can’t major, then minor. If not a minor, take an elective. If you can’t take a class, join a dance troupe, a drama club, a poetry circle. The form matters less than the courageous decision to step into the stream. Join the grand conversation because we are rapidly forgetting what it means to be alive.

You’ll hear mechanical voices insisting that the humanities are a waste of time and that only “marketable” credentials matter. Ignore them. In this age of artificial intelligence, studying literature, poetry, and art is a radical act. Let them be your clarifying force. Let them carry you — us — into whatever comes next.

Jason Ray Carney, a senior lecturer in English at Christopher Newport University, is the author of Weird Tales of Modernity (McFarland, 2019). His essays and reviews have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.