Bookstores give us millennials a feeling of nostalgia and authenticity.
They remind us of a simpler time— before iPhones stole our eyes and the busyness of adulthood stole our time. They take our minds back to the days when we were read our favorite bedtime stories or when we wrote every night in our journal.
Trips to the bookstore slow us down from our busy lives a bit.
They take time... in a good way. Unable to just click a "download" button, we actually have to expend some of our time and effort in order to find what we're looking for.
And, as we're looking, the narrow hallways created by the bookshelves encourage interactions with the people we pass; the variety of ideas in the books we come across encourage intellectual thought and conversation.
Trips like these cause us to turn off autopilot and be more present and
Sadly, we seem to associate books with the past.
They've become a somewhat old-fashioned means of gaining information or learning a story. Now, everyone watches Netflix movies or YouTube videos or listens to podcasts.
If people do choose to read books, it's often not a traditional paper book but a file on some sort of tablet instead which, personally, just doesn't satisfy me like a trip to my childhood bookstore.
I hope my generation isn't the last to hold these memories and feel this way. But is that just the changing of times?
