I Can Read. I Just Don't Want To.
Why bother with all those dense, boring paragraphs when you can get the dopamine hit of the summary in a single click? Are you even reading this yourself?
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Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
I have a confession to make. I haven't actually read a full book in months. And you know what? It feels fantastic. Why would I?
You see that little sparkle that's appeared everywhere? In your browser, your email, your notes app? That’s not just a button. It's a key. A key to a world without the tedious, soul-crushing effort of… well, reading. It’s the ultimate life hack for the clever and energy-saving individual, if you are someone clever and energy saver like me.
The Sweet Release of the Gist
Think of long, boring articles. Scientific papers. Those classic novels you were supposed to read in school. Before, you had two options: suffer through them, or lie. Now there’s a third, beautiful way. You feed the pages to the machine—a little Gemini here, a dash of Claude there—and it whispers the important parts right back to you. It’s like having a dealer who cuts your impenetrable Dostoevsky with a pure, fast-acting plot summary. All of the credit, none of the work.
I get the bullet points, the "key takeaways". I have the perfect illusion of knowledge. And isn't that what knowledge is, really? An illusion you can confidently project?
People call it the "new illiteracy". I call it efficiency. It's a superior form of reading, a post-textual existence. We're not "unable" to read; we're simply choosing a better, faster, more pleasurable delivery system for information. Raw, unprocessed text is the boring vegetable; the AI summary is the delicious, sugary concentrate. You wouldn't chew raw coffee beans, would you? For more on how our brains are being rewired, the grown-ups at The Atlantic have plenty of dense text for you to not read.
Of course, the first hit is always free. That convenient little ✨ icon is just waiting for your tired eyes. Soon enough, reading anything longer than a tweet without it will feel like withdrawal. And I, for one, can't wait.
Your turn: what was the last book you pretended to read?