The TL;DR Is the Only Part I Read

I’ve fallen in love with the “Summarize” button. No, really. It’s the single greatest invention since the corner office. I click it, and a beautiful, dense, 20-page report that some poor soul spent a week writing collapses into three glorious bullet points. Chef’s kiss.

It’s not laziness, you see. It’s efficiency. A strategic allergy to detail. Why would I wade through nuance, context, or that dreadful thing called “prose” when the pure, uncut insight is waiting for me? My dealer—I mean, my AI assistant—knows exactly the dose I need. Just the conclusion, the recommendation, the number. All killer, no filler. It’s the executive summary of life itself.

My team has started to notice. They send me these long, winding emails, full of justifications and appendices. They haven’t understood yet that their words are just raw material for my little sparkle-syringe. I don’t read their emails; I process them. The AI scrapes out the meaning, and I get a clean, sterile hit of information.

Some people might call this an intellectual deficit. I call it an upgrade. It’s like having a butler for my brain, one who tidies up all the messy thoughts before they can reach me.

I’ve heard whispers about the downsides. That I’m missing the “why.” That I’m making decisions based on a shadow of the real picture. But honestly, the original document feels like the boring, un-cut version of the drug. Why would anyone want that?

If you want the deep-dive version of this problem, the grown-ups at the Pew Research Center have been tracking how we read online for years.

Of course, it’s about balance. The methadone, basically, is to force yourself to read one entire, uninterrupted page of a physical book before you let yourself click “Summarize” on anything at work. For more on this, the book Dopamine Nation is a good place to start detoxing.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a dozen reports to not read. Tell me I’m wrong.