A lot of what I see online now is written by AI, my own feed included, and I've started to notice what it does to my attention. I skim.. I look for the bullet points. If a paragraph runs longer than four lines, part of me wants to jump to whatever the takeaway is. I do this even with posts I actually care about, which is the part that worries me.
I don't think I'm the only one. Reading is slowly dying, and I mean the slow kind, where you sit with long stretches of words and let them build. People are swapping it for bullet points because they're efficient, or for audiobooks at a faster speed so a book gets finished sooner. I get the appeal, and I'm not judging anyone, because I've done versions of it myself. But a book was never meant to be efficient. Reading is slow.. almost glacial, and I think that's exactly how it's supposed to work.
In GTM and B2B, speed is the whole culture. We write short emails, short messages and short decks, and most of the time that's right, because the person on the other side is busy. Being direct is a skill I've worked on. Still, some of the best conversations I've had at work were the ones where someone took the time to explain something in full sentences, with detail, and let me follow their thinking. You can't get that from a bullet point. Part of what makes a person worth listening to is that they've practiced thinking in paragraphs.
Books are dying, and AI is making a mess of a lot of what we read, that much is true. But I don't think we have to go along with it. Reading is one of the few things I do that no tool can speed up for me, and that's the reason I want to protect it. Right now I'm rereading Educated by Tara Westover, or trying to, with Rufus, my cat, showing zero respect for my focused reading time. Orbit by Samantha Harvey is another one, a quiet novel about astronauts circling the Earth that gives you almost nothing to skim. You can only enjoy it by slowing down to the pace it was written at.
I also keep a box of tiny copies of every book on my to-read list. When I finish one, I pull the next without looking, so I never lose forty minutes deciding. It's a small system, but it keeps me reading instead of deciding.
So read a book. And carry one with you, always, because the minutes you'd otherwise spend scrolling are exactly the minutes a book is good for. Keep some things human, and let them take as long as they take.