I love to read. I wish I could advise more people to read. There’s a whole new world in books. If you can’t afford to travel, you travel mentally through reading. You can see anything and go any place you want to in reading.

The Cheapest Door to Everywhere

There's something almost radical about reading in a world that's constantly selling us the idea that experiences have to be expensive, documented, or physically traveled to count. Michael Jackson understood that books offer something genuinely irreplaceable—not a inferior substitute for "real" experience, but a parallel universe entirely. When you read, you're not just consuming information; you're actually inhabiting someone else's perspective, their time, their struggles. Your brain lights up the same way it would if you were there.

What's easy to miss is how reading does something social media and streaming can't quite manage: it forces you to slow down and imagine. You have to build the world yourself, sentence by sentence. That act of construction is where the real travel happens. It's why a book about a medieval marketplace can feel more vivid and present than scrolling through vacation photos.

The practical truth is that reading remains one of the cheapest doors to genuine expansion. A library card costs nothing. That matters now more than ever, when so many ways to broaden your world come with hefty price tags. But beyond economics, there's something deeper: reading teaches you that the life you're living right now isn't the only life possible. It reminds you that other ways of thinking, living, and being exist—and that knowledge quietly changes how you move through your own world.