Are we developing wisdom for the challenges of life? Are we getting good at the chess game of success?
There are several ways to develop the power of wisdom, and one of them is the amount of time we invest into “long-form” content. There’s a difference between sh0rt-form and long-form information, and they have different effects on the way we think.
The world is packed with information of all shapes, sizes and length. Television soundbites are short-form. Tweets are short-form. Most social media posts are short-form. A 500-word article in USAToday is short-form.
Don’t get me wrong. Short-form can be really good. Here’s an example of some wise and to-the-point phrases:
- Be happy with what you have while working for what you want.
- Don’t judge someone just because they sin differently than you.
- Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.
There’s much more to life than gaining wisdom, so it’s also good (and wise) to take time to enjoy the videos and pictures on social media and the internet:
- Just this morning I watched a video of a gray squirrel dancing on Facebook and saw a picture of a chameleon holding a leaf like a guitar. I love that stuff.
- @texas_hillcountry’s Instagram account always has amazing pictures. I’m not from Texas, but these Texas photographers put out great stuff every day.
Then there’s long-form media, like the 2,000 word magazine articles I read in Wired and Time, and the 10,000 word articles in the pages of New Yorker. Then there are the books I read that range from 80,000 to 120,000 words.
This long-form content offers more complex and in-depth insights than you can get from sh0rt-form.
Take the history of slavery in the United States as an example. If you want to know how slavery came to America, and you don’t believe the simplistic myth that “southern slave-owners were pure evil,” you’re going to have to go to long-form, because it takes too much time to unpack the differences between indentured servitude and chattel slavery, and too much time to trace the history and dynamics that led southern plantation owners to justify chattel slavery, despite the fact that everyone today sees chattel slavery as a terrible crime to humanity.
How did early southern Americans get to that point in their thinking and culture? A long article on the history of slavery might do justice to the answer. At least 5,000 words. The depth of insight and argument we’d need to hear can’t be packed into a television soundbite or a short article on USAToday.
Here’s the point. If we want to be wise; if we want to win the complex game of life; if we want a better and clearer and more thorough understanding of how the world works and how to work best in it, we’ve got to invest in long-form. We’ve got to learn how to quiet the monkey-mind and develop our ability to read stuff that goes beyond a few hundred words.
How do we do this?
It’s going to take work, because insta-culture has grooved our brains for simplistic, short-form media. But we can do it. We start to switch more time over to long-form, because we don’t want to bring a checkers mindset to the chess game of life. We want to think better and live better, so we stick with long-form for the long haul. We develop the habit of daily long-form reading, and eventually, we’ll develop better thinking skills and better perspective.
It does require shutting off the television and the radio and the smart phone for a while though. I know that’s a terrible sacrifice for most, but isn’t a wiser life worth the price?