We've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency. One that wants love without awkwardness, wisdom without confusion, transformation without the growing pains that crack us open and rebuild us from the inside out. And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not... See more

Compression culture rewires your body, too. Not just your brain. Notice how you read now: shoulders hunched like a predator ready to pounce on the next piece of information, breath shallow and rapid as if oxygen itself were scarce, eyes darting frantically across screens like a rat in a maze searching for the cheese of instant gratification. Your... See more

Because the telling is alive, shaped by whatever grief or joy we've carried into that particular afternoon.

Every time you choose the summary over the story, you're performing surgery on your own brain. You're cutting away the neural pathways that let you sit still, that let you stay curious, that let mystery work its slow magic on your bones. You become a creature of surfaces, skimming endlessly across the water but never learning to breathe underwater.... See more

We've built temples to the lie that you can skip the line on your own life, that growth is just another thing you can Amazon Prime to your doorstep.

But somewhere along the way, perhaps with the rise of industrial efficiency, perhaps with the commodification of education, perhaps with the acceleration of information capitalism, we began to mistake information for knowledge, and knowledge for wisdom. We began to believe that the value of an experience could be separated from the experience

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This compression culture doesn't just change how we think, but I argue it changes what we expect from every aspect of human experience! We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.

Indigenous storytelling traditions know that the power of a story isn't in its moral or message but in the way it creates a space where meaning can emerge.

We're approaching a moment where the ability to be confused, to be uncertain, to be changed by encounters with complexity will become a form of resistance — resistance to the flattening of human experience, resistance to the compression of meaning, resistance to the optimization of mystery. In a world of instant answers, sustained questioning... See more