The fantasy of optimization and the cost of reading less
Sometimes the thought arrives in the middle of a dull moment, like when the screen lights your face a little too brightly.
You wonder what would be left of you if the phone slipped from your hand and cracked itself into silence. The idea sits there, oddly gentle. A quieter version of your life hovering just out of reach, framed by hikes you do not take and books you do not finish.
Step back, and the pattern feels familiar.
The hope that less noise will automatically make room for depth. The belief that attention is a muscle we’ve forgotten to use. And yet the world keeps filling the gaps faster than we can clear them.
Even without the feeds, the days stay crowded. The mind keeps reaching for shortcuts. The bar for feeling informed has never been higher and never felt so thin.
It’s strange how this age of constant reading has left people less sure about what counts as literacy.
We take in more words than anyone before us, scattered across tiny screens that hum with urgency. At the same time, the longer paths feel harder to return to. The slower gain of pages. The patient climbs difficult books.
Still, something else is happening beneath all this. People are learning to find precisely what speaks to them and skipping what doesn’t, a precision that sharpens their tastes while narrowing the terrain they roam.
The tension is obvious.
A world that offers you only what you already want will eventually trap you within your own preferences. The smaller the bubble, the safer it feels, and the more the edges fall away. Communities flatten into streams.
Conversations turn smooth too quickly, losing the friction that once pushed people beyond themselves. Even curiosity can get streamlined into a loop that constantly circles the same spot.
Yet there is a flicker in all this that feels oddly hopeful.
The sense that a different pace is still possible, even if it must be chosen deliberately. A slower room. A harder book. A conversation that drifts without a script. Nothing heroic. Just small refusals that make space again.
The mind remembers these places. It settles into them with relief, like stepping out of the noise long enough to hear your own thinking again.