Too long? Read it anyway.

Somewhere in the last few years, "TL;DR" stopped being a joke and became a habit. A long email arrives and we skim for the ask. An article looks dense and we paste it into a chatbot. A friend sends a thoughtful message and we reply to the gist.

None of this is a moral failing. It's a reasonable response to too much text and too little time. But it has a cost we rarely stop to count.

Reading for its own sake was already slipping before AI arrived. A 2025 study of more than 236,000 Americans in the American Time Use Survey found that the share of people reading for pleasure on a given day fell by more than 40% between 2003 and 2023, a decline of about 3% a year. Now we have tools that make not reading effortless.

At the same time, we're drowning in text that nobody really read or wrote. Researchers at Stanford and BetterUp coined a word for one version of it, "workslop": AI-generated work that looks polished but has no substance, and pushes the real thinking onto whoever receives it. In their survey, about four in ten workers had received some in the past month, and each instance took nearly two hours to deal with, on average.

So we skim more, partly because there's more not worth reading. Then the habit spreads to the things that are.

What we're actually losing

When you read something properly, you're not just collecting information. You're practicing a handful of quiet skills: following an argument to its end, noticing what an author implies but doesn't say, catching the moment a claim outruns its evidence, and, finally, being able to say what you think in your own words.

A summary gives you the conclusion. It skips the practice. And like any skill, these get rusty when you stop using them. (We dig into the research on that in The skills you don't notice losing.)

Why this isn't anti-AI

We use AI. DidRead even uses it, to react to your answers. Summaries are useful, and so are calculators, maps, and spellcheck.

The point isn't to refuse the tools. It's to keep a part of your thinking in shape, so you can tell when a summary got it wrong, so your writing still sounds like you, and so a long, good piece of writing feels like a pleasure instead of a chore.

Five minutes, on purpose

That's what DidRead is: one short passage a day, chosen because it's worth reading, and one question that asks you to actually engage with it. Sometimes you'll find the line that proves a point. Sometimes you'll explain an idea to an imaginary friend. Then you get a reaction to your thinking, not a grade.

It won't fix the internet. But five minutes a day of reading something properly is a small way of saying: this, I'll do myself.

Too long? Read it anyway.