tuesday, the long way round
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Today:
- what you lose when you optimize everything, and why the slow version of something is sometimes the only version worth having.
- a mountaineer who took a route nobody else would take, and what he said when they asked why he did not just use the faster path.
- Readwise Reader, a way to actually absorb what you read instead of just collecting it.
- one thing to do today without your phone in reach.
I watched someone use an AI to summarize a book in about 45 seconds last week. A book I spent three weeks reading. And my first instinct, genuinely, was to feel like an idiot. Like I had wasted time. Like efficiency is the whole point and I had missed the memo.
Then I thought about what I actually remembered from those three weeks. The corner I folded over on page 94. The argument I had in my head with the author on the train. The paragraph I copied out by hand because writing it made me feel it differently than reading it. None of that is in the summary. None of that can be.
Your perception^
Think of something you did slowly, the long way, without shortcuts. Not out of stubbornness, but because the process was the point. When did you last do that? And when did you last feel genuinely proud of something, not just relieved it was done?
There is a version of productivity that is quietly starving you. It gets things finished. It clears the list. It keeps you moving. But somewhere in all that moving, the texture of things gets sanded away. You stop tasting the meal because you are eating standing up. You stop feeling the conversation because you are already composing your reply.
I noticed this in myself with music. I used to listen to whole albums, start to finish, doing nothing else. Now I have a playlist of 600 songs and I skip most of them. I have more music than ever. I am less moved by any of it.
Optimizing for volume is not the same as optimizing for depth. And I think somewhere deep down you know which one you actually want.
"It is not enough to be busy; so too are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?"
Henry David Thoreau
Your acceleration^
In 1984, a British mountaineer named Joe Simpson and his climbing partner made it to the summit of Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes, a peak that had never been climbed before by its west face. On the way down, Simpson broke his leg badly. His partner, Simon Yates, did the only thing he could think of: he lowered Simpson down the mountain on a rope, section by section, in a blizzard, for hours.
Then Simpson slipped over an ice cliff and hung in the dark, suspended, pulling Yates slowly toward the edge. Yates could not haul him up. He could not hold on. After 45 minutes, he cut the rope.
Simpson fell into a crevasse. Yates assumed he was dead and descended alone.
What happened next is this: Simpson, with a shattered leg and no food or water, crawled out of the crevasse and spent three days dragging himself back to base camp. Not quickly. Not efficiently. He moved a few feet at a time. He set a rock as a target, made it there, set another rock. He did not think about the whole mountain. He thought about the next rock.
He made it back hours before Yates was due to break camp and leave.
The reason this stays with me is not the survival part. It is the method. No shortcut existed. No optimized route. The only way was the slow way, completely present, one small target at a time. And that slowness was not a failure of the situation. It was the whole answer to it.
What in your life right now is asking for that kind of attention, and are you giving it something faster instead?
Your move^
Try Readwise Reader. You save articles, newsletters, and longer pieces there, and it highlights and resurfaces the best bits on a schedule so they actually land in your memory rather than vanishing the moment you close the tab. The specific outcome: that article you bookmarked four months ago and never finished becomes something you actually absorbed. Free to start, takes about five minutes to set up. Import one thing you have been meaning to read properly, and read it today, all the way through, with the app closed on everything else.
Your destination^
Choose one thing you are going to do today without trying to make it faster. A walk without a podcast. A meal you actually sit down for. A conversation without half-watching your phone. Not as a detox, not as a challenge. Just as a small act of taking something seriously enough to give it your full attention.
What is one thing you have been rushing through lately that deserves to be done slowly, and what would it feel like to actually do it that way?
Floyd
P.S. Simpson wrote a book about it. "Touching the Void." Read the actual book.