The Abbreviation of Everything
Someone told me recently that they like this newsletter, but don’t have time to read the longer essays.
“It’s okay,” they said. “I feed them into AI. It gives me a short summary, and I still get a few nuggets I can use.”
I said that was fine. And on one level, it is. We’ve always searched for efficiency. We’ve always tried to make life a little faster. Phone calls became texts, then emojis. News stories became headlines. Opinions were limited to 150 characters. Dinners we once cooked turned into food delivered to the door. Goodbyes turned into ghosting.
Now we have machines to finish the job—to compress a book into a page, a meeting into bullet points, a relationship into a feed of updates.
It’s easy to see the appeal: save time, skip the awkward parts, move on. But if you pay attention, something slips away each time we cut things short. Long conversations don’t just fill time. They teach us to really listen, to sit with someone’s silence and uncertainty. Writing our own words helps us figure out what we actually think and feel. Making something for someone builds care and attention into our hands. Staying for the hard goodbye teaches us how to let go with grace.
These are not inefficiencies; they are how humans learn to love, forgive, heal, and endure.
Technology didn’t invent this shrinking, it just made it effortless. And that’s the danger. When the world keeps shortening everything, we start to shrink too: quicker, shallower, easier to move past.
I’m not afraid technology will replace us.
I’m afraid it will reduce us—until the long, complicated work of being human gives way to something short, simple, and hollow. You can see it happening.
Every so often, it’s worth resisting. Read the entire book. Have the whole conversation. Cook the meal yourself. Write your own words. Stay for the goodbye. The long version of life is where we actually become who we are.