compression culture is making you stupid and uninteresting

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

They understood that repetition wasn't redundancy, but ritual! And each telling was both the same story and a completely new experience, shaped by the particular moment, the specific voices, the quality of attention brought to bear.

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 becom... See more

the future belongs not to those who can consume information most efficiently, but to those who can engage with complexity most deeply. Not to those who can extract the most key points, but to those who can dwell most fully with irreducible experiences. Not to those who process the most data, but to those who allow themselves to be processed by what... See more

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 kn... See more

Because it felt like asking someone to summarize a kiss. Like requesting the bullet points of grief. Like demanding the key takeaways about laughing until your stomach hurts.

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 n... See more