I run over 40 AI agents in the background of our acquisitions team and I still read (sometimes trashy) fiction at night. One of these is doing more for my judgment than the other, and before you assume it is the 40 agents, let me explain.
I want to be honest about something first: I am not immune to doom scrolling. I sit with my phone at 8pm scrolling Instagram. Fifteen minutes turns into forty-five, I am more anxious than when I started. Now I am just worried my chickens are going to get mites and I am not being a good mother.
The nights I actually reset, I read. And I mean anything. A good novel, a mediocre novel, nonfiction (currently reading 1491 by Charles Mann). The last book I read (Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke) had the most ridiculous premise. And I highly recommend it.
Here is what I have come to understand about why this works: doom scrolling and reading feel like rest but they are neurologically opposite. Scrolling keeps your nervous system in a constant low-level state of alert. Your brain never settles into a rhythm because the input never slows down. Reading does the opposite. It asks you to build and hold something sustained in your mind over time, a world, a set of characters, a sequence of events that you have to follow and care about. Your processing speed actually drops, in the best possible way. You are no longer in triage mode. You are just inside a story.
That distinction matters more now than it did five or ten years ago. Our team runs 40-plus individual AI skills working in the background on our real estate acquisitions, things that used to take days of human bandwidth now run in minutes, and what that means practically is that we are making more decisions, faster, with more depth, than we were in 2020. That is genuinely remarkable. It is also a lot of cognitive output in a day, and the brain still needs somewhere to land that is actually different from work.
A book does not make me smarter on the day I read it. It makes me more present the day after. And the value of showing up clear the next morning is higher than it has ever been.
So read something. Read something great if you want. Read something completely ridiculous if that is what you need right now. Just put the phone down.
What are you reading right now? And for the truly brave: what is the last genuinely trashy thing you finished and secretly loved?
Forty AI Agents, One Book Before Bed
