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Nothing here is broken. It’s just being shortened.
Staying a little longer.
There’s a subtle shift happening in how people create.
Not a collapse.
Not a crisis.
Something quieter, a change in how thinking unfolds.
Thinking is being shortened.
Not because we lack intelligence or curiosity, but because the early stage of thinking feels unpleasant. It’s slow. Unclear. Awkward. Full of half-formed impressions that don’t yet deserve daylight. So we move past it quickly.
Something still gets produced. Often it looks fine. Sometimes it looks even polished. But the part where you wrestle with the idea, the phase that actually shapes it… never fully happens.
The work advances.
The thinking doesn’t.
That has consequences that don’t show up right away.
When the difficult parts are consistently skipped, the mind adapts. Confusion becomes something to avoid instead of inhabit. Discomfort turns into a signal to look outward rather than stay with the question. Over time, making turns into choosing between what already exists. The role quietly shifts.
Nothing breaks dramatically.
Nothing fails outright.
The result stays coherent.
Readable.
Acceptable.
But it carries no internal pressure. No residue of struggle. Nothing that lingers after it’s consumed.
A brief pause for today’s sponsor.
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Crafted with L-theanine, lemon balm, gentian root, damiana, and elderflower, Vesper is sparkling, tart, and beautifully herbaceous—truly crave-worthy.
Dry January isn’t about giving things up. It’s about discovering something better. And Vesper makes every pour feel like a yes.
This isn’t a problem of tools or methods.
It’s a problem of order.
Reaching for help, before you’ve spent time with your own confusion, doesn’t expand thinking. It replaces the part of the process where thinking is shaped. What feels like efficiency is often just relief from discomfort.
And relief is seductive. It feels like progress. But it trains a habit that weakens over time: the habit of moving on before the idea has taken shape.
The real danger here isn’t dependence on something external.
It’s thinning.
A gradual loss of tolerance for unfinished thoughts. For discomfort. For not knowing yet.
What survives is polish.
What erodes is depth.
The correction isn’t dramatic.
It’s simple and difficult in the same way most meaningful things are:
Stay longer than feels comfortable.
Let your first attempts be rough.
Allow thinking to be heavy again.
Not everything needs to be rushed.
Not every idea needs to be completed in half-formed fragments.
Some parts of thinking exist only if you don’t escape them.
And once they’re gone, nothing can bring them back.
-Jairo
