This one is more confessional than the others. I want to tell you about something I noticed in myself this year that I'm still uncomfortable about.
I had stopped wanting depth.
Not consciously. Not as a stated preference. I would have told you, if you asked, that of course I value careful thinking, slow reading, the patience of staying with a hard question. I have built a brand around that idea. I have written a book on it.
But what I noticed — late one evening, finally honest with myself — was that my actual behavior, the thing I did when no one was watching, had drifted in a different direction.
I was reading less and skimming more. I was finishing fewer paragraphs. When something in the middle of a piece slowed me down — a complicated argument, a definition I had to hold in my head while the next clause unspooled — my hand would reach for the keyboard shortcut, the new tab, the search bar, the question to the AI. Just summarize this for me. What's the takeaway. Get me to the conclusion.
The slowness, which used to be where the thinking happened, had started to feel like an obstacle.
I had become impatient with depth.
I want to be careful naming this, because I think most of us are inside it without seeing it.
There's a force in the current information environment that does not show up in any conversation about productivity or efficiency, but that I think is the most significant cognitive shift of our era: speed has been priced as progress.
Faster summaries. Faster answers. Faster prep for the meeting. Faster reading. Faster writing. Faster everything. The tools that have proliferated over the last three years are almost all, at their core, tools that compress the time between question and answer.
This is presented to us as efficiency. And in many narrow contexts, it is. I do not want to do my taxes more slowly. I do not want to wait longer for a flight to be booked. There are domains in which speed is straightforwardly good.
But there is a category of work — the work of coming to understand something — that does not function this way. In that category, the slowness is the point. Not because slowness is intrinsically virtuous, but because the slow process is what the work is. You cannot speed it up without removing it.
When I read a difficult paragraph and have to hold it, re-read it, build a model of what it's saying — that holding is the comprehension. The summary I could get from the AI is not a faster version of that work. It is a different thing. It is information about the paragraph. It is not understanding of the paragraph. The two are easy to confuse, especially in retrospect, because both leave you able to answer questions about what the paragraph said.
But they do not leave you with the same person.
The trade has a name, and once you see it you can't unsee it.
You are trading quantity of exposure for quality of understanding. You are trading more for less deep. You are trading the experience of working through ten paragraphs slowly for the experience of skimming a hundred summaries quickly. The summaries pile up. They feel like progress. They feel like productivity. They feel like you are covering more.
And you are, in the only sense the metric captures.
But the question that doesn't get asked — because no one is asking it, because the environment doesn't reward asking it — is: what kind of mind does this produce, over years?
The honest answer, in my experience, is: a mind that knows about more things and understands fewer of them. A mind that can name the topics in the recent news cycle but cannot, when pressed, defend a position on any of them in detail. A mind that can produce competent commentary on almost anything and original insight on almost nothing.
Most professional environments will reward that mind handsomely for the next several years. Eventually, in ways the metrics will be late to capture, they will not.
I am not going to tell you to read more slowly. I am not going to tell you to delete your AI summaries and force yourself through every paragraph at the rate of 1985.
What I will tell you is this: the speed feels like progress. Depth feels like effort. In a world that has prized speed and discounted depth this consistently, most of us will choose accordingly, most of the time, without ever having made the choice consciously.
You can make it consciously. Once a week. Once a day. Once on the piece that matters. Pick something — an essay, a chapter, a difficult conversation — and stay with it at the speed it was actually meant to be read at. Notice the resistance. Notice that the resistance is a relatively new feature of you, and that it isn't permanent, and that it goes away when you simply refuse to obey it for the next forty minutes.
That's all. No homework. No system to install. Just an occasional refusal of the speed default.
The thing that's at risk isn't your productivity. It's the version of you that used to come back from a slow read different than you went in.