In Praise Of Brevity
What I read: Quotes That Will Change Your Life: A Curated Collection of Mind-Blowing Wisdom by Russ Kick. Published April 1, 2017.
This post isn’t about the referenced book in its entirety. In fact, I’m still reading this book. I’ll write more about it later. Rather, this post is about my thoughts after reading this particular passage in the introductory portion of the book.
I also like lists, bullet points, fortune-cookie fortunes, bumper stickers, Dr. Bronner's soap labels, flash cards, microfiction, trivia books. I prefer short stories to novels, short films to feature films, haiku and quatrains to five-page poems, Hemingway to Joyce. Maybe that's why I drink spirits, not wine or beer. Distill things for me. Boil them down to their essences. Take out the dross, the impurities, the filler.
What Russ Kick was alluding to was his love for the short, the brief, the concise. The moment I read that I had one of those “that’s me!” moments.
My entire life I’ve struggled with my propensity to gravitate toward shorter forms of most things. I consume long-form media of various types such as books, movies, and so on, but it's the concise short-form to which I seem to constantly return most often.
The truth is it’s not just my reading. I tend to like short everything. I’d rather undertake a short project with more immediate outcomes than a longer one. I find myself watching shorter documentaries than longer ones. Given the choice between watching a long-form show on television, I’m more likely to watch a few shorter videos online or a series with shorter episodes. I break up my daily exercising into two or three separate short sessions rather than a single long one.
It's not just the types of reading and media I consume. I also tend to chunk my day-to-day activities into many short sprints rather than fewer long sessions. For example, my writing style is to write throughout the day in spurts rather than sit down and crank out words in a single longer effort.
When I mentioned this was a struggle, what I was referring to is the steady stream of advice and directives in self-help books and productivity media and within our culture itself to err on the side of the longer, focused effort rather than shorter bursts of media consumption or work effort. Despite intellectually understanding that all this messaging should not negate my own way of functioning, it still produces angst that my nature contradicts the advice to go long, At times I doubt my life and work style.
Our entire culture worships at the altar of length. 300-page novels and nonfiction books are widely lauded while collections of short stories and essays are not. Numerous awards are given for long-form movies while shorts are given a cursory pat on the head and a few crumbs of recognition. In education the semester-long class is a gold standard while the student who learns better in shorter, disparate ways is considered somehow not as well educated.
Why am I writing this? Probably to hammer home to myself that it’s okay to like things shorter and more concise. Perhaps you also prefer things shorter in your own life and feel the same pressure to conform to consuming or engaging in longer forms. If that’s the case, all I can tell you is you’re not alone.
After much introspection and metaphorically banging my head against the wall for years, I can say with conviction that there is nothing inherently superior about longer forms of anything. They’re just different. If you grasp an important concept from a social media meme rather than after reading a tome of a book, that’s fine. There’s nothing wrong with you. It’s just how you function.
I’m getting over my internal battle between short and long form practices and have come to some peace with it. One thing I also do is consume longer forms of things in smaller chunks. Perhaps this is why I always have three or four books I’m reading that I pick up and put down constantly as I switch beween brief reading stints of each. Recently I watched a movie on a streaming service and since it thankfully bookmarks exactly where I left off, I came back to it three times before finishing it. This is more the norm than the exception for me.
So, lest I violate my own desire for brevity, I’ll end this post now. If you are someone like me who likes shorter forms of things, I hope you’ll find some solace in knowing I’m the same way and others have expressed similar preferences. If you like longer forms, that’s great too. Undoubtedly longer forms suit certain topics or intentions. In such cases, if you’re like me, realize it’s perfectly fine to start and stop as many times as you want before you finish.
My hope is that instead of us assuming the long or short is superior that we’ll realize they’re just different and how each of us consumes or utilizes them will vary with our individual needs and styles.
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