The Summary Economy Is Making Us Shallow

Why our obsession with shortcuts is robbing us of deep thought.

In our information-dense modern world, everything has been boiled down to its simplest form. With our ever-decreasing attention span, we resort to GPT-ed summaries, 60-second YouTube Shorts, and 280-character tweets to supply us knowledge.

I’m guilty of it as well. It’s a running joke in my circles that I always ask for “the SparkNotes summary” before my friends tell me long-winded stories.

I saw a tweet providing a “hack” to consume more information from self-help books. Instead of reading books cover-to-cover, they call someone who’s already read the book to ask them their takeaways from the book.

I’ve seen this rhetoric before, with many productivity gurus pushing back against the “read 10 pages every day” motto of the self-improvement space, instead emphasizing reading summaries to extract maximum insights out of the book in minimal time.

The 80/20 Power Rule or Pareto Principle is an illustration of this. You’re pulling out 80% of the content in 20% of the time. In theory, you’re changing the ratio between your input and output for the better. Is it really optimal, though? I’m convinced otherwise.

That last 20% of content is the most valuable. Reading a story at length feels like a two-way conversation between the writer and your thoughts. The author’s emotion and personal anecdotes are what color an otherwise “dictated” summary that leaves minimal room to truly interact with the material.

Reading is an inherently personal experience. Your information intake is framed by your own life and knowledge. An objective summary might have value in grounding your understanding, but we live in a subjective world. Calling up friends who’ve read the book might be better, but you’re still corroborating experience; you’re not connecting experience.

We humans best act on information that is relevant and personal to us. One of my favorite books of all time, How to Win Friends and Influence People, has numerous stories on business interactions using negotiation strategies. The sales calls examples that I’ve meticulously read line-by-line with my own lived experience of sitting in on my dad’s financial planning sales calls. I’m able to connect each and every step of the interaction with what I see playing out in a real business setting.

I’ve come to appreciate these tiny details in a book. I’ve noticed my brainwaves spike at certain points throughout a read. Certain words jump out at me, sticking in my head as priorities. Anecdotes and mental models serve to build “uniquely Adi” mental frameworks.

It’s easy to skim over an AI-generated summary of the “key points” of a book/paper. When we invest time in something, we’re telling ourselves it's worth absorbing. The subject matter will stick with you much more closely than a tweet-sized motto.

We have so much bite-sized information coming in from all directions; I’m instead committing myself to fewer, deeper dives on meaningful content.

Deep dives into books commit us to knowing the most out of the best content. For me, I think I know what’s next on my reading list, end-to-end.