There was a time when access was the problem. Books were limited by geography and cost. Films arrived slowly, often years late. Lectures were tied to place and schedule. To encounter something meaningful required effort, patience, and often luck.
That condition has reversed. Today, what presses on us is not scarcity but abundance. Streaming platforms open into endless catalogs. Bookstores, both physical and digital, suggest more titles than a lifetime could hold. Academic lectures, interviews, sermons, and conversations circulate freely, detached from place and often detached from time.
Choice itself becomes heavy. Selecting one film from thousands already feels like a small act of loss. To commit to a long book means refusing many others. Even before we begin, a quiet regret appears, not because the chosen work is lacking, but because the rest remains unseen.
It is within this atmosphere that new habits of consumption have taken root. People watch films at double speed. They skim long articles. They welcome spoilers. They rely on outlines and summaries before deciding whether to proceed. These behaviors are often described as symptoms of impatience or distraction, but they can also be read more generously. They are attempts to live sanely within excess.
The pandemic did not create this condition, but it made it impossible to ignore. When lectures moved online, students discovered that speed was adjustable. Information could be compressed without collapsing entirely. A long held assumption quietly dissolved. Slowness was no longer sacred by default. It had to justify itself.
This shift did not arrive with celebration or protest. It simply settled into everyday life, becoming normal before anyone fully articulated what had changed.
Compression as Care, Not Escape
It is tempting to frame summaries, spoilers, and accelerated playback as shortcuts. But shortcuts imply evasion. What many people are actually doing is triage.
When the available material exceeds the capacity of a single life, some form of filtering becomes necessary. Outlines help us orient. Summaries allow us to grasp shape and direction. Spoilers reduce anxiety by removing uncertainty, making it easier to decide whether a full encounter is worth the emotional and temporal cost.
Artificial intelligence enters precisely at this point. It does not merely condense information. It reassures. It suggests that nothing essential will be completely lost. Even if one does not read a long essay from beginning to end, one can still encounter its argument, its tone, its movement.
This is not indifference to meaning. It is heightened awareness of finitude. Life feels short not because it suddenly became so, but because abundance makes limits visible. Compression becomes a way of caring for time rather than dismissing depth.
Earlier critiques of ease often assumed a shared cultural discipline around patience. That discipline was enforced by circumstance. Slowness was unavoidable. Today, when slowness is optional, it becomes something else entirely. It becomes a choice rather than a virtue signal.
The presence of AI sharpens this transition. Mechanical acceleration has given way to intelligent mediation. Instead of simply going faster, we now ask what matters. That question, even when implicit, changes the moral texture of consumption.
The Few Things That Actually Change Us
Despite the flood of content, something surprisingly stable remains. When people are asked which books or films changed their lives, they rarely list many. Even those who consume endlessly tend to name only a handful.
This was true in earlier generations and it appears to remain true now. Transformation does not scale with volume. It never did.
What shapes a person is not the number of works encountered, but the depth of relationship formed with a few. These relationships often develop over time. A book read once may instruct, but a book returned to across years can reshape perception.
This pattern suggests that meaning is not produced by consumption style. It emerges through repetition, timing, and readiness. The same text can remain inert for years, then suddenly speak when circumstances align.
Abundance does not eliminate this structure. It only hides it beneath noise. Once the noise is filtered, the same old pattern reappears. A small number of works become companions. They travel with a person through seasons of change.
A Text That Grows Because We Do
The Bible offers a clear example of this pattern, not because it is unique, but because it is so often reread. Many encounter it early in life, sometimes without much comprehension. Later, they return and discover that what once seemed distant now feels intimate, even demanding.
The text does not change. The reader does.
Youth reads for instruction. Middle age reads for endurance. Later years read for reconciliation. The same passages carry different weight because the questions brought to them have changed.
This kind of reading cannot be rushed. It is not informational in nature. No summary can substitute for the slow accumulation of lived context that allows words to open. Artificial intelligence can clarify references, explain historical background, or offer thematic overviews. These are valuable. They make entry easier. They reduce unnecessary confusion.
But the work of being changed by a text still unfolds in time. It depends on loss, responsibility, joy, and fatigue. It depends on what the reader has endured since the last encounter.
This is not a limitation of technology. It is a feature of human meaning. Some forms of understanding require duration not because they are complex, but because they are relational.
Writing Long When Most Will Not Read Long
Within this landscape, long form writing occupies a quieter position than it once did. It is no longer the default mode of serious engagement. Many readers will skim. Some will rely on summaries. Others will encounter the work through conversation rather than direct reading.
This reality can feel discouraging, especially for those who labor carefully over language and structure. But it may help to see long form writing as having shifted roles rather than lost value.
Extended writing becomes a source rather than a performance. It is the place where thinking completes itself. Where contradictions surface and are resolved. Where tone is tested and attention sustained. Only something fully formed can be meaningfully compressed.
Artificial intelligence depends on such source material. It cannot generate faithful summaries from shallow writing. Compression requires prior expansion. Depth at the source is what allows flexibility at the surface.
There will still be rare readers who read fully. They are often invisible and slow to respond, but they matter. They are the ones who return later, who reread, who carry ideas forward into their own lives and work. Long form writing has always been partly for such readers, even when they were more numerous.
There is also another audience that is often overlooked. The writer. Writing long is a way of thinking honestly. It is a discipline of care. Even if few read every word, the act itself shapes the one who writes.
Optional Depth and the Shape of the Future
What seems to be emerging is not the disappearance of depth, but its repositioning. Speed has become the default. Depth has become optional.
This may sound like a loss, but it can also be read as clarification. When slowness is no longer enforced, it reveals who truly desires it and when. Depth appears where relationship forms, not where endurance is demanded for its own sake.
People will continue to skim most things. They will rely on AI to orient, summarize, and explain. This does not prevent them from slowing down when something matters. In fact, it may help them recognize those moments more clearly.
The future of reading may look lighter on the surface and more selective beneath. Fewer full readings, but more intentional returns. Fewer obligatory classics, but stronger attachments to a small number of works that grow alongside a life.
In such a world, writing fully remains an act of respect. It acknowledges that some thoughts deserve time, even if not everyone will give it. It trusts that meaning does not need to be maximized, only made available.
Life has always been short. What has changed is that we can no longer pretend otherwise. To write carefully now is not to resist the age, but to live honestly within it.
Some readers will arrive through summaries. Some will never read past the opening. A few will stay and return later. That has always been the case. The difference now is simply that we can see it.
And perhaps that clarity is not a loss at all, but an invitation to write with even greater care, knowing that what lasts rarely announces itself at first encounter.
Image: StockCake
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