We don’t read anymore. We crave summaries. Not just of articles or reports, but of lives, movements, ideologies.

Give it to me in a headline. Better yet, a meme. Better still, a TikTok with captions because I can’t be bothered to listen.

We’ve trained ourselves to skim, scroll, and swipe past anything that demands focus. Our attention span has dropped to eight seconds — shorter than a goldfish’s. At this point, the only thing evolving is our ability to forget what we were outraged about ten seconds ago. We want insight in a soundbite, depth in a tweet, nuance in bullet points — and we’re suspicious of anything that takes longer than a breath to grasp.

Here’s the problem…reflection takes time. Critical thinking takes effort. And god forbid we sit with a complex idea long enough to be changed by it.

TL;DR isn't just about content anymore. It's about how we’ve started treating thought itself: a burden. An inconvenience. A luxury we no longer afford.

But it’s a lie we tell ourselves. The truth is there are no shortcuts to true understanding. You can’t compress truth into a caption and expect it to carry the same weight as really wrestling with a complex idea.

Some things should be hard. Some things should take time. Otherwise, we’re just skipping straight to the conclusion and pretending we earned it.

With the introduction of AI, this just becomes more urgent and more extreme. We’re already asking AI to summarize things for us. To explain things to us. And then we take what it tells us as fact, even though we know AI can “hallucinate.”
A fancy branding that means "wrong."

If we won’t take the time to think, how can we possibly move forward as a society? Thinking is, after all, the first step toward growth.

If we continue down this path, TL;DR could become DR;CR — didn’t read; can’t read. And that could be followed by CR; DT — can’t read; didn’t think. Until what we’re left with is CT; KO — can’t think; knocked out.

---

(This post has no TL;DR. You were supposed to read the whole thing...)