The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of claiming it. -- Maria Popova

Read this quote somewhere in an article & it got me thinking 🤔

Pathological impatience. What an accurate way to describe the ails of our time.

Summarize an article in an instant. Automatically respond to all your emails. Get cookies delivered to your doorstep in 10 minutes. Capture the most value with the least work.

Speed and efficiency are the promise of modernity. But speed and efficiency are all destination and no journey. And it is journey that gives life meaning.

How do we reclaim the joy of doing something slow and difficult, the satisfaction of not doing what is easiest? If more effort is wasted doing things that don’t matter (doomscrolling for hours) than is wasted doing things inefficiently (taking time to draft a good email), how do we reorient towards elimination of what’s unnecessary, instead of hyper-optimization of what’s important?