Just give me the bullet points.

—So, you read the quarterly analysis?

—I read the summary.

—The AI-generated summary.

—It’s faster. You get the gist.

—The gist is that the gist is killing us. Did you see the numbers on page 47?

—Were they in the bullet points?

—No.

—Then I did not. Look, I have seven other reports to “read” before lunch. The little sparkle icon in my inbox is my dealer. It gives me the hit, I get the big picture, I move on. What’s the problem?

—The problem is that the big picture is a comforting hallucination. A watercolor painting of a spreadsheet. The details—the actual, inconvenient, money-bleeding facts—are in the footnotes. Which the AI politely sands down into “challenges and opportunities.”

—It sounds like a “you” problem. My dashboard is all green. My summaries are optimistic. We’re “leveraging synergies” and “driving innovation.” It says so right there. Are you calling the algorithm a liar?

—I’m saying the algorithm is a brilliant pusher. It knows what you want to hear. It mainlines corporate jargon directly into your veins, and you get a nice little dopamine rush of feeling informed without the nasty business of actually knowing anything. You’re high on summaries.

—And you’re sweating over paragraphs. Who’s the addict here?

The fine print

I suppose you think you’re better? You, reading this right now, scrolling past the big blocks of text to find the punchline? Don't you?

Maybe the execs are just ahead of the curve. They’ve outsourced the boring part: reading. They’ve achieved a zen state of pure, unadulterated overview. No friction, no nuance, just the smooth, clean high of the executive summary.

It’s a powerful dose. The confidence of knowing everything, without the burden of having learned a single thing. And if the company burns? Well, the AI will write a fantastic summary of the fire.

My only advice, if you want to try sobriety for a day: next time you get a long document, commit to reading just one full, randomly chosen page. Not the first, not the last. Page 28. See how it feels to chew on the data yourself. It’s methadone, basically. You can find more structured detox plans on the Freedom blog.

Tell me I’m wrong.