I read an interesting essay by Ed West - Doomscrolling ourselves to death - a review of James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages. It explores how TV and phones have contributed to falling literacy rates, and how the rise of short form content and the “attention economy” are resulting in declining attention spans and cultural stagnation. It’s quite long, but I found it a worthwhile read.

Why should you go and read a ~3000 word essay when I have just summarised the key points in a couple of sentences in the first paragraph of this post? Well that’s the crux of it really. Sometimes you need to sit with an idea for a while to really absorb it.

I’ve found myself falling into this trap sometimes. Why read Dale Carnegie’s book on How to Win Friends and Influence People when you can just look up a summary and reap the benefits much faster? I’ve tried the shortcut, but it never worked. The reality is that we don’t learn like that. A condensed summary might serve as a useful refresher to someone who has read the book, or an indicator of whether it covers what you are interested in, but it will not embed the ideas themselves in any meaningful way. Books like this are often accused of labouring the point¹, but I find that the repetition and exhaustive exploration of the principles through varied anecdotes is necessary to ensure that you actually internalise the ideas.

Sometimes you just have to marinate in it.

Footnotes

1. And admittedly some really are unnecessarily padded. ↩