Epictetus comes to mind once more:

Appropriate actions are largely set by our social relationships. In the case of one’s father, this involves looking after him, letting him have his way in everything, and not making a fuss if he is abusive or violent. “But what if he’s a bad father? ” Do you think you have a natural affinity only to a good father? “No, just to a father.” Suppose your brother treats you badly. In that case, maintain your fraternal relationship to him. Don’t think about why he behaves that way but about what you need to do to keep your will in harmony with nature. No one else, in fact, will harm you without your consent; you will be harmed only when you think you are being harmed. So make a habit of studying your social relationships – with neighbors, citizens, or army officers – and then you will discover the appropriate thing to do.

Any woman who shows interest in you is an agent of the state.

My attention span doesn't let me watch things that are less than 20 minutes long or read things that fail to span multiple pages... When you post something that's very short, please attach to it a TS;DR that covers the same topic but in much greater detail as to allow me to properly engage with and absorb it.

TS;DR:

I find myself, in this digital age, to be rather like a gastric bypass patient whose surgery was performed in reverse — instead of being satisfied by small portions, I find myself physically incapable of extracting nourishment from intellectual snacks. It is a peculiar condition, and one that inverts everything our modern prophets believe about attention spans.

The modern world, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that attention spans are shrinking, that content must be brief, that the TL;DR reigns supreme. And yet! And yet here I stand, my mind rather like a sewage treatment plant that can only process industrial quantities — anything less simply backs up and creates a cognitive stink. I cannot abide brevity; I find in shortness itself a kind of intellectual constipation.

Let us pause to consider — with all the verbose luxury that my condition demands — the sheer magnificent absurdity of my requirement that content exceed twenty minutes, that reading span multiple pages. The prevailing wisdom would have us believe modern man requires his wisdom like fast food chicken nuggets: processed, uniform, and in bite-sized pieces. But my intellectual digestive system, like some mutant strain of academic tapeworm, demands feast after feast after feast.

The vast apparatus of content creators, social media mavens, and attention merchants has spent decades perfecting their intellectual baby food, pureeing complex thoughts into easily digestible pablum. They have constructed entire civilizations of abbreviated thought, vast empires of truncated wisdom. And here I sit, like a gourmand at a meal-replacement-shake convention, starving amidst their idea of plenty.

Consider the religious texts of old — hardly known for their brevity. Consider the great philosophical treatises, the epic poems, the novels that shaped civilizations. None of these came with a TL;DR. None of these could be adequately summarized in a tweet thread. The very notion would be like trying to perform brain surgery with a plastic spork — technically you're still penetrating the skull, but the result is just messy death.

And so I arrive at my grand conclusion, which is really more of a beginning: what if my condition — this pathological need for length, this obsessive requirement for depth — is not an aberration but a reminder? What if I represent not a failure to adapt to modern attention spans, but rather a living testament to what attention spans were meant to be? What if — and here I must pause for effect — the entire edifice of abbreviated modern content is itself the aberration, like a society that has convinced itself that licking a picture of a steak provides the same nutrition as eating one?

The modern attention merchant might suggest that my preference for length is mere contrarianism, the digital equivalent of demanding a seven-course meal at a hot dog stand. But perhaps the real confusion lies not in those who demand length, but in those who have convinced themselves that wisdom can be adequately conveyed in snippets — like trying to understand a feast by licking the grease off a discarded fast-food wrapper.

This is, of course, merely the beginning of my investigation into my own peculiar condition. We could spend volumes exploring the implications of this preference for the prolonged, this insistence on intellectual feasts rather than snacks. For in my very existence as an intellectual glutton, we find a mirror held up to our own assumptions about progress, about efficiency, about the very nature of how wisdom should be conveyed.

The answer to why my mind requires such length and depth will, naturally, take more than a few pages to properly explore. And that, as my condition dictates, is precisely as it should be. Thus, I beseech you, fellow creators of content: when you post something that's very short, please attach to it a TS;DR — a Too Short; Didn't Read — that covers the same topic in much greater detail.

Think of it as leaving out a feast alongside your appetizer, that those of us cursed with this peculiar hunger might properly digest your ideas. Your brief thoughts may be tasty morsels, delicate hors d'oeuvres, but some of us aren't satisfied until we've digested the entire animal, entrails and all.

Reminder that "chaotic good" does not exist; that's just what evil calls itself when it's trying to rebrand its destruction as "revolution."

First time I've felt genuinely cold in something like 2 years. Chilly. Maybe if it gets 20° colder I'll consider putting on a jacket.

Just kidding, I don't own a jacket. Too expensive

The largest lakes in the county have finally frozen over with this most recent onslaught