speed reading is a necessary skill for any serious attempt at a good life. like touch typing.
speed reading skills include:
- rapid serial visual presentation
- listening to sped up audio, including with text-to-speech
- effective skimming and searching
- speed reading paper books (optional for most people, who can get ebooks of most stuff they read)
- being able to keep up. being able to understand and retain what you read at higher speeds
(yeah there's a couple exceptions like blind people. not many.)
reading is a huge part of learning. if you read twice as fast then you can read twice as much stuff. then you can learn way more.
if you don't learn this stuff, you're basically just going to have a worse life. you'll spend more time per book. you'll lose time. not learning to read fast is basically just throwing away part of your life (unless you don't read much, which is a different way of throwing your life away).
another skill any reasonable person trying to have a good life would learn is how to use google search well. lots of people suck at finding stuff with google (like they choose search terms poorly and misjudge which search results to click on) and don't realize it and don't do anything to get better. another common way people use google badly is they search the wrong thing and then start clicking links instead of recognizing the got the wrong results and doing a new search immediately.