Too Long, Must Read: Gen Z, AI, and the TL;DR Culture

“You should use AI to create a summary. TL;DR.” The comment stared back at me from beneath my latest article – a piece I had poured weeks of effort into, meant to be a rich 30-minute read. I felt equal parts disbelief and indignation. Did they really just ask for a machine-generated summary of my carefully crafted story? In that moment, I wasn’t just annoyed at one flippant remark – I was confronting a widespread modern mentality. We live in an era where “too long; didn’t read” is practically a motto, and where TL;DR culture threatens to turn deep, meaningful reads into bite-sized info nuggets.

This experience got me thinking: What is wrong with people today? Why does no one have time (or patience) to read a full article anymore? It’s not just me being melodramatic. The signs are everywhere, especially among Gen Z. At an online webinar hosted by Dentsu UK recently, I listened in shock as Gen Z panelists openly admitted they don’t read full books – only summaries. One even bragged that he doesn’t bother watching entire football games live; he just catches the highlights on his phone the next day, and that’s “good enough.” A few decades ago, such admissions might have been unthinkable for a self-professed avid reader or sports fan. Today, it’s practically the norm for a generation that has never known life without the instant convenience of the internet. And yes, something does feel off about this.

No Time for the Full Story?

Let’s start with the obvious defense: “We’re all busy! Who has time for a 30-minute read?” Gen Z especially often claims they are too swamped to consume lengthy content. But is that really true? Ironically, surveys suggest young people have more leisure time now than previous generations did – they’re just not spending it reading or watching long-form content. Psychologist Jean Twenge notes that today’s teens and young adults spend significantly less time on homework or jobs than in the 1970s, theoretically leaving more free hours at home. Yet, the share of high school seniors who didn’t read any book (for fun) in the past year quadrupled from about 11% in the late 1970s to 41% by 2021. In the late ’70s, nearly 40% of 12th graders read six or more books a year for pleasure; now only 13% do.

Even the brightest, college-bound students have dramatically cut back on reading literature in their spare time. If they “don’t have time,” what are they doing?

The answer, unsurprisingly, stares back from the glowing screen of a smartphone. Twenge’s research pinpoints that around 2012 – when smartphones and social media took over – leisure reading plummeted. By 2023, teens were averaging nearly 5 hours per day on social media apps. Those hours scrolling TikTok, Instagram, YouTube – that is the missing time. When endless feeds of quick content beckon, reading a long book or article starts to feel like an arduous marathon. Gen Z has grown up with infinite content at their fingertips, and it’s conditioned them to seek instant gratification. Why slog through a dense 5,000-word article when a 280-character tweet or 60-second video will spill the “hot take” or summary? In their world, information flows in a firehose stream – and if you pause to deeply engage one story, you might drown missing out on the next dozen memes and updates.

This ethos extends beyond reading. Consider sports: traditionally a leisurely, immersive pastime. Now a sizable chunk of young fans would rather watch a two-minute highlight reel than a two-hour live game. In fact, a global survey by YouGov found only 31% of sports fans aged 18–24 watch live matches at all, versus 75% of fans 55 and older. The vast majority of young viewers instead catch highlights on social media or YouTube and follow athletes on Instagram for key moments. Why invest time watching a full match (with all its tense lulls and strategic build-up) when you can wake up to a highlight montage of every goal, dunk or homerun?

To Gen Z, it seems like efficient use of time – but something important is lost in translation (more on that later).

Gen Z’s notorious impatience is not just anecdotal; it’s been measured. They are often cited as the generation with an attention span of barely 8 seconds – a stat that gets debated, but the spirit of it rings true when you observe how quickly they flip between apps, tabs, and stimuli. Raised in the on-demand economy of one-click purchases and 10-minute grocery deliveries, young people understandably chafe at anything slow. Waiting is anathema; patience is a rare virtue. One Forbes report cheekily noted Gen Z is the quickest to hang up if placed on hold during a phone call – they simply won’t tolerate delay. Everything in their environment, from technology to entertainment, has trained them to expect instant results. This constant state of now, now, now has psychological consequences.

In discussions about declining reading, some experts point out that endless instant gratification has eroded our ability to settle in and focus for the long haul. As one counselor observed, society has “accelerated to the point that we no longer enjoy the process, but instead just want to leap to the outcome”. Nowhere is that more evident than in our media habits: we skip to the end, skim the summary, fast-forward the boring parts, and then wonder why the full experience felt meaningless.

The Psychology of Skimming and Splitting Attention

It’s easy to label Gen Z as “lazy” or “ignorant” for these habits, but there are deeper psychological forces at play. For one, the sheer overload of information in the digital age is unprecedented. We’re all drowning in news articles, blog posts, videos, social updates, memes, and messages. Faced with this infodemic, younger people have developed coping mechanisms: skimming, filtering, and summarizing everything, just to stay afloat. TL;DR, which literally means “too long; didn’t read,” started as a tongue-in-cheek internet slang, but it captures a real sense of informational fatigue. The term entered Oxford Dictionaries Online back in 2013 with the note that it’s often “used as a dismissive response to a lengthy online post”. Dismissive is the key word – TL;DR in practice means “I couldn’t be bothered to read all that; just give me the gist.” In an age when dozens of new items vie for our attention every minute, who hasn’t felt the temptation to say that?

Gen Z, being digital natives, have essentially always lived in this state of information overload. Their media diet has been dominated by “snappy snippets” from the start – think 10-second TikToks, emoji-filled group chats, headlines pushed via notifications. Consuming content in tiny, rapid-fire doses feels natural to them. Meanwhile, reading a long novel or a detailed investigative piece can feel unnatural – almost like a muscle they haven’t had to develop. Cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf reminds us that deep, reflective reading is not an innate human ability but a learned skill that must be practiced and honed. If you don’t use it, you lose it. And indeed, Wolf warns that as we allocate more of our reading time to skimming and scrolling, our capacity for “deep reading” – with all the rich empathy and critical thinking it fosters – can atrophy. In a digital culture defined by speed and efficiency, our brains adapt; we become really good at swiftly scanning for key points, but worse at concentrating on complex, layered narratives. The medium shapes the mind.

Another factor is the social dimension of how Gen Z processes information. With constant connectivity, young people often engage with content communally – sharing quick takes on Twitter, riffing on memes, watching shows together via group chats.

Information is as much a social currency as a personal pursuit.

This encourages breadth over depth: it’s more important to know a little about everything trending right now (so you can participate in the online conversation) than to deeply absorb one long piece of content. Reading the summary of that big article or the Wikipedia plot of the hot new series is enough to tweet or joke about it with friends. Actually, investing hours in reading the full thing alone might even feel isolating or like wasted effort if the social discussion has already moved on. The result is a kind of FOMO-driven skimming – Gen Z hops from one summary to the next, skimming just enough to stay in the loop on countless topics, but seldom pausing to fully dive into any one of them. It’s breadth at the expense of depth, and it’s reinforced by their peer culture as well as the tech platforms that reward constant engagement.

Psychologically, there’s also the simple lure of instant reward. Classic studies in behavioral psychology show that immediate rewards can hijack our attention more effectively than delayed gratification. Every like, swipe, or quick clip is a tiny dopamine hit. Reading a long article or book, by contrast, front-loads the effort and delays the payoff – you might not get to the “good part” or the revelation until you’ve waded through pages of setup. To a brain trained on instant hits, that feels excruciating. The patience for delayed gratification is like a muscle too – and it’s one that many young folks haven’t had to flex often in the age of Google answers and same-day deliveries. Their brains aren’t worse than those of previous generations; they’ve just been molded by a world that prioritizes speed. Gen Z isn’t inherently “crazy” or “ignorant” – they’re adapting (quite rationally) to an environment of too much information and not enough time. But in adapting, they may be paying a price in what they miss out on by skimming life’s surface.

Why Summaries Are No Substitute for Substance

Even if we empathize with the why of TL;DR culture, we have to confront the consequences. What do we lose when we only read summaries, only watch highlights, only seek the TL;DR of every experience? In a word: nuance. Summaries, by their very nature, strip away the details, context, and richness that give a story its meaning. They’re the skeleton without the flesh. Sure, a summary can tell you the events that happened or the points made, but it almost always misses the soul of the piece – the very elements that might persuade, move, or enlighten you.

Let’s return to my own little saga. The commenter who asked for an AI-generated summary of my article presumably wanted the key points in a few sentences. But if I could have conveyed the full message in just a few sentences, I would have written a Facebook post, not a full-length article! The whole reason I wrote a 30-minute read was because the story needed time to unfold. There was context to lay out, examples to illustrate, a narrative to build, perhaps even some humor or emotional beats to let sink in. That detailed reasoning is not fluff – it’s the substance that makes the conclusion compelling. As one columnist once wrote in People’s Daily (ironically scolding TL;DR habits way back in 2016), “A direct conclusion isn’t persuasive on its own without the detailed reasoning to take you there.” Exactly. A summary hands you the conclusion but deprives you of the journey – and often the journey is the point.

Think of a murder mystery novel. If you read only the summary, you’d know whodunit, but you’d miss all the red herrings, suspense, and character development that made the reveal satisfying. Or consider a classic like “Moby Dick” – summarized: “Obsessed sea captain pursues white whale, everyone dies except one.” Okay… but that doesn’t convey the grandeur, the philosophical musings, the feeling of being on that doomed voyage. The summary is factually accurate and utterly inadequate. In the same way, a summary of a thoughtful article often misses the essence. It might state what the author said, but not why it matters or how it resonates. The texture of the argument, the anecdotes that give it life, the tone of the writing – gone.

This problem is magnified when we rely on AI to do the summarizing. AI tools are now everywhere, cheerfully promising to boil down any text or video into a neat synopsis.

Even while I am typing these words into Word, Microsoft’s Copilot pops up permanently to create a summary of this article.

It sounds like a dream for the busy modern human. But these tools have serious limitations. An AI doesn’t truly understand meaning and context; it detects patterns and frequencies. As a result, AI-generated summaries often fumble the nuance. A recent government trial in Australia pitted AI summarizers against human experts, and the verdict was brutal: the humans beat AI in every way. Reviewers noted that the AI summaries frequently “missed emphasis, nuance and context”, sometimes even introducing incorrect or irrelevant information. In other words, the machine-made TL;DR might not just oversimplify your article – it could distort it or focus on the wrong points entirely. Imagine trusting a robot to summarize a long investigative report; it might omit the single crucial detail that the whole story hinges on. Or it might mischaracterize the author’s stance by losing the subtleties of tone and irony.

Even when AI summaries avoid outright errors, they tend to produce a shallow take. AI lacks human emotional intelligence and lived experience, so it can’t judge what really matters to a story’s impact. It might dutifully report the most repeated facts or the topic sentences but overlook the “aha” insight buried subtly in paragraph 12. As one analysis of AI tools put it, these systems “struggle to capture the depth of complex texts, leading to a superficial understanding that can misrepresent critical findings”. They “often struggle to understand the intricate context…and may overlook subtle references or cultural nuances”. The result? A summary that’s technically concise but hollow, like a cake with all the flavor removed. Summaries – especially AI-made ones – also have a habit of over-simplifying complex issues. They reduce multifaceted arguments to blunt bullet points, sometimes “failing to capture the essence” of the piece.

This oversimplification has real implications. Maryanne Wolf, the reading researcher, warns that we risk creating an “illusion of being informed” by consuming nothing but bite-sized bits. It feels like we know a lot because we skimmed 20 summaries today, but without deeper analysis, it’s all surface-level. We might confidently spout a statistic or a takeaway we read in a summary, without realizing we missed the caveats or counterarguments that a full reading would have revealed. In a way, summary culture can make us overconfident and underinformed – a dangerous combo. It’s the classic “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” Think about social media debates, where someone reads a headline or a one-paragraph summary of a study and suddenly considers themselves an expert on a complex issue.

That’s a direct product of TL;DR habits: we consume just enough to have an opinion, but not enough to truly understand.

Furthermore, context matters. A summary often plucks facts out of the context that gave them meaning. For instance, a summary of a medical article might report “Drug X reduced symptoms by 50%,” but omit that the sample size was 12 people or that the funding came from the drug’s manufacturer – context that drastically changes how we interpret that 50%. Similarly, an AI summary of a long political essay might state the author’s conclusion without conveying the nuanced reasoning or the uncertainties the author acknowledged. That can be misleading. Reviewers in the Australian study noted exactly this – AI summaries sometimes “missed relevant information” and “focused on auxiliary points”, giving a skewed picture of the original.

And then there’s the emotional and experiential loss. When you only watch the highlight reel of a sports game, you see the slam dunks or touchdowns, but you don’t feel the suspense of a close contest’s ebb and flow. You miss the narrative of how victory was built or lost play by play. Likewise, a summary of a passionate essay might tell you the author’s position, but you likely won’t feel the passion. You won’t chuckle at the witty aside they included or pause in thought at the personal story they opened with. In short, you won’t care as much, because the summary didn’t take you on the journey that evokes care. Summaries are clinical; stories are human. And humans respond to stories. We remember the vivid example, the clever metaphor, the detailed explanation that finally made things click – none of which fit into a tidy TL;DR.

When TL;DR Feels Like Disrespect

There’s another side to this issue, and that’s how it feels from the creator’s perspective. Writers, journalists, creators, even the poor soul who curates a lengthy Twitter thread – they all put thought and effort into how they present information, not just what information they present. So, when someone breezily demands a summary – essentially “Can you strip away all the style, effort, and nuance and just give me the bullet points?” – it can feel downright insulting. I know it did for me. It was as if that commenter was saying: “All those carefully chosen words of yours? They’re just fluff. I only value the raw facts, which I could have AI extract anyway. Your work is just the wrapper for the data.” Ouch.

Imagine spending days slow-cooking an intricate, flavorful stew, only to have a diner say, “Could you just blend that into a smoothie so I can chug it in one go?”

That’s what asking for a TL;DR is like to a writer. Yes, you’ll get the nutrients either way, but you obliterate the culinary experience. The chef (or author) didn’t add those spices and textures for nothing – they wanted you to taste them. When someone says, “skip the details,” it’s hard not to hear it as “your details don’t matter.” For anyone who pours their craft and heart into creating something comprehensive, this is gutting. Writers and creators today increasingly lament that if their piece isn’t a listicle or a 2-minute video, a big chunk of the audience will scroll past or ask for a summary. It feels like a disregard for the art of storytelling and argumentation. A summary culture can inadvertently devalue the very work of creation, reducing it to data.

It’s also a self-fulfilling prophecy: if creators know readers will only care about the TL;DR, some might stop trying to produce in-depth work at all. Why write that 5,000-word nuanced essay if most people will see only a one-paragraph summary on Reddit? Why labor over a feature film if the audience just wants the spoiler-filled recap on YouTube? We risk sliding into a world where less and less content has depth, because depth isn’t appreciated – a world of shallow hot takes and quick hits devoid of lasting insight. That might sound extreme, but the trend lines are not encouraging. Twenge points out that even schools, bowing to new realities, assign fewer full books and more short excerpts now, because students just won’t read long texts. If young people aren’t even required to practice deep reading in school, how will they learn to value it later? The decline of long-form reading isn’t just some grumpy writer’s lament – it has ripple effects on education, creativity, and even our civic life. Complex problems – from climate policy to ethical dilemmas – cannot be understood via sound bites alone. If we lose our collective ability to engage deeply, we lose our ability to solve these problems, or even to care enough about them to act.

I don’t mean to suggest that every long article is good (oh, plenty are rambling or could use a good edit!) or that every summary is evil. Summaries have their place – a well-done abstract can help you decide if an academic paper is worth reading fully, for instance. And of course, not every piece of writing warrants undivided attention. The danger is in making summaries the default for how we consume everything. It’s in Gen Z (and let’s be honest, many of the rest of us too) reflexively asking for the TL;DR of anything that exceeds a paragraph, as if depth is a bug, not a feature. The danger is when “didn’t read” becomes something to boast about – when skipping the actual content is seen as savvy efficiency rather than a missed opportunity.

Dear Gen Z: We Hear You, But You’re Missing Out

So where does that leave us? If you’re a Gen Z reader who somehow made it to this point (congratulations on the attention span, truly!), you might be thinking: “Alright, I get it, long stuff good, summaries bad, blah blah. But we’re just trying to keep up with a fast world. What do you expect us to do?” It’s a fair question. The world is fast now, and none of us can consume everything in full. We do have to skim and triage sometimes. But here’s my plea: don’t confuse convenience with equivalence. A summary is convenient, yes. It is not equivalent to the full experience. And in your heart, you probably know that. Those Gen Z panelists at the webinar who said they only read summaries? I wanted to ask them: do you really feel moved or transformed by a summary? Does a CliffsNotes of a novel ever make you cry or spark your imagination the way the novel itself might? Does watching just the highlight reel of a game give you that spine-tingling excitement of a comeback victory or the deep frustration of a hard-fought loss? Or is it just… meh, another piece of content checked off?

I suspect many of you feel an emptiness in only skimming the surface. The same technology that offers endless content also leaves many feeling oddly unsatisfied, even bored. It’s the paradox of choice: gorging on many shallow snippets can leave you starved for real substance. The good news is the full course meal is still out there – if you’re willing to slow down and savor it. Yes, it takes effort to read a long article or an entire book or to watch a slow-burn film without reaching for the phone. It’s not always easy; it is a kind of discipline. But the rewards are so worth it. Deep reading (or deep watching, or deep listening) is one of the few activities that can truly transport you out of your own head and into someone else’s perspective or a new realm of ideas. It builds not just knowledge, but empathy and patience – qualities that summaries, however clever, simply can’t impart. In fact, researchers argue that deep reading is linked to empathy and critical thinking in a way that is hard to replicate otherwise. When you fully immerse in an author’s world, you practice understanding complex characters and arguments, and you sharpen your ability to think through complexity yourself.

Those are human skills no AI summary is going to give you.

And to the writers, creators, and anyone who toils on long-form work: don’t lose heart. Clearly, there are those who still value what you do (if you’ve read this far, you are definitely one of them – thank you!). Not everyone in Gen Z is a summary junkie; in fact, some are pushing back against the shallow content tide. I’ve seen young people devour 500-page fantasy novels in one weekend or binge hours-long video essays on esoteric topics. The appetite for depth isn’t dead; it’s just competing with a lot of junk food. Our job is perhaps to remind others – gently, humorously, persuasively – what they’re missing when they only consume the SparkNotes version of life. We should say, “Hey, we hear you – you’re busy and overwhelmed. But trust us, you’re mistaken if you think the TL;DR gives you the same richness as the real thing.” Sometimes, the juice is worth the squeeze.