Richard Mellor
Another excellent piece by Oliver Kornetzke. It is from his Facebook Page I chose the title here. The essay made me think about the importance of the over 30 years of battles, I found myself in as a union activist in the workplace for more leisure time, the shorter workweek, increased time off, socialised housing and a national health system in addition to the immediate day to day conflicts.
The importance of working people controlling production and all aspects related to it is paramount. Work, especially here in the US, can be so draining, consume so much of our time, even if we wanted to, we are too exhausted by the end of the shift and simply need to wind down, we need to self-medicate. It is important though to find ways to break this assault on our attention span which may mean we have to make some efforts when we write to bridge that gap.
Capitalism damages us both physically and mentally. It is a barbaric system. Enjoy the read.
May 7, 2025
One of the more quietly troubling patterns I’ve observed—not just in reactions to my own writing, but across the broader public discourse online—is the growing impatience with depth. Long-form commentary, essays, even well-structured posts that dare to stretch beyond a paragraph or two are often met with eye-rolls or dismissive responses. “Too long.” “Didn’t read.” “Get to the point.” It’s become increasingly clear that many people no longer want to engage with ideas that demand time. People want short, fast, digestible answers—even when the questions are impossibly complex.
This isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, but its consequences here feel especially acute. In a country already battling anti-intellectualism and propaganda-induced fatigue, the aversion to deep engagement is more than a cultural quirk—it’s a liability. When the appetite for constructive substance dries up, what’s left is the kind of oversimplification that weakens democracies, accelerates disinformation, and hollows out our collective understanding.
Perhaps there’s more to this than just laziness or distraction. Perhaps what we’re seeing is the psychological inheritance of millions of years of survival conditioning being brought to the surface—induced by an increasingly complex and seemingly chaotic world. A world that continues to put stress and strain on our minds, which evolved not to absorb global crises or digital noise, but to assess and respond to our immediate surroundings. We were shaped to scan the horizon, not an infinite feed. Our neural systems were never built to ingest everything—especially horrors and atrocities—from every corner of the globe on an endless, unrestricted loop 24/7. It seems in the face of this sensory and emotional overload, the instinct to shut down, to simplify, to scroll past, is more than understandable—it is, in many ways, inevitable.
And yet, if we also want to address the deepening stress and strain on our minds brought about by this complexity, we must do more than merely endure it—we must confront it. That means giving ourselves not just the time, but the space, to discuss and process the very atrocities we’re exposed to. The inhumanities. The headlines and horrors that saturate our screens. Not only so we might understand the crisis itself, but so we might begin to reckon with the aftermath—on the psyche, on the nervous system, on the human condition. There is a weight to witnessing, and unless we are allowed room to carry and examine that weight, it will quietly distort our ability to live and relate with empathy and clarity.
The reality is that our ancestors survived by responding quickly to their environments. The human brain evolved under conditions of scarcity and danger—favoring immediacy, efficiency, and instinctual judgment. For most of our evolutionary history, the ability to make rapid decisions—whether to fight, flee, or forage—meant the difference between life and death. Our neural architecture still bears the marks of that primal urgency.
However, we no longer live in forests or open plains, foraging for food or fending off natural predators. We live in human-constructed systems—economic, social, political—that have layered themselves into unimaginable complexity. Yet our human brain still itches for the fast answer, the immediate resolution, the shortest path to satisfaction. The instinct that once helped us survive now conspires with modern forces—capitalism, media, digital platforms—to keep us reactive and overstimulated.
Capitalism, in particular, has not merely exploited this impulse—it has refined it into an entire ecosystem of instant gratification. Industries are designed around speed: fast food, fast fashion, fast content. The gears of the machine turn ever faster, and individuals are expected to keep pace—producing, consuming, reacting, scrolling. There is less and less space for introspection, ambiguity, or nuance. The cost of pausing—to think, to read deeply, to reflect—is too high in a culture built on manufactured urgency.
So, when one offers a multi-paragraph commentary—on social or economic justice, politics, culture, anything really—it’s often met not with curiosity but with exhaustion. Not because the ideas are unworthy, but because we’ve conditioned ourselves to resist anything that doesn’t conform to the quick-hit model of digital attention. And then, with the same breath, we complain about polarization, misinformation, and the decline of public discourse.
This is the paradox we now inhabit: a world ever more in need of careful
thinking, yet increasingly hostile to the very habits that make such thinking possible.
We must acknowledge our shared reality: the world is not simple. It cannot be condensed into a few words, or a catchy headline, or a pithy meme. The crises we face—climate collapse, economic inequality, systemic injustice, technological dislocation—are deeply interconnected. And there are no singular ideologies or dogmas that hold all the answers, no one right way to think, live, or solve. This isn’t to excuse cruelty or injustice—inhumanity must always be confronted—but it is to say that there is no single lens through which the full spectrum of human experience, belief, and progress can be understood. If we are to move forward, it won’t be through rigid binaries or absolutist thinking, but through dialogue, flexibility, and the uncomfortable grace of nuance.
The problems we face demand more than summaries. They require a tolerance for complexity, a humility about what we know, and a renewed willingness to wrestle with difficult, sometimes uncomfortable truths. None of that can happen if we continue to treat every piece of writing like an imposition on our time.
We possess one of the rarest gifts evolution has produced: complex language. Through it, we’ve been able to create societies, philosophies, moral frameworks, art, science. We invented writing not to summarize the obvious, but to give form to the difficult, the abstract, the emotional. It is through language—rich, full, messy—that we understand ourselves and one another.
So why are we now discarding that gift in favor of tweets and emojis?
This trend toward brevity—toward boiling down layered arguments into stripped, decontextualized soundbites—has real consequences. We simplify until we misunderstand. We reduce until we distort. And we end up crafting “solutions” that only deepen the very problems they were meant to solve.
Interestingly, many people still find the time and space to read novels, traditional journalism, or academic texts when they appear in traditional settings. But online, something changes. We’ve absorbed the logic of the platform: everything must be short, clickable, optimized for dopamine. The medium, as philosopher McLuhan once said, becomes the message—and in this case, the message is to rush.
If we are serious about confronting the intellectual and moral decay we so often decry, we must begin by reclaiming our capacity for attention. We must resist the cultural impulse to treat brevity as a virtue when it becomes a substitute for meaning. We must engage, even when it’s uncomfortable, inconvenient, or slow.
Because if we don’t—if we continue to allow our most important conversations to be dictated by the logic of speed and simplicity—we will watch the world unravel in headlines and hashtags. And we’ll be left wondering how it happened, even though the answer was there all along: we stopped paying attention.
So, to those who took the time to read this all the way through—thank you. I’m not going to reduce my thoughts to fit the confines of what’s convenient. If the point I’m trying to make takes a few paragraphs to say clearly and honestly, then so be it. Writing should be judged by its substance, not its length. The ideas matter more than the word count. I write not for brevity, but for clarity. And clarity sometimes takes time.
And if that makes it less shareable, so be it. I’m here to think, not to trend.
No comments:
Post a Comment