Direct but shallow: the summary's Dilemma

We have become a generation of newsletters. We are authors of our own summaries, meticulously curating a personal abstract: the bio, the status update, the professional headshot, the carefully constructed dating profile. We have internalized the logic of the feed, believing that if we can just package ourselves neatly enough, if we can become legible and easily consumable, we can be understood. We are terrified of the void, of the gaps in our knowledge of each other.

But this is the great lie of our low-bandwidth age. For everything said, all that is left unsaid is used to fill in our knowledge gaps. In the analog world, those gaps are not a void; they are rich with the disembodied discourse of a sigh, a shared glance, a hesitant pause, the scratch of a pen on paper. The "unsaid" was a high-bandwidth signal. In the digital world, the gaps are a vacuum, and we rush to fill them with the worst, most paranoid, and most uncharitable noise.

This drive to eliminate the gap, to replace the complex unsaid with the simple said, is a regression. If a meme can fully disclose our thoughts, then our thoughts are juvenile. This is precisely the point Steven Pinker’s work on language and common knowledge highlights. The "everyone knows that everyone knows" framework is the operating system of human social intelligence. We use innuendo, plausible deniability, and indirectness because our thoughts are complex and relational. We don’t say, "I am socially superior and demand you move," we say, "Pardon me." We don't say, "Sleep with me," we say, "Want to come up for a drink?" In a job interview, a candidate doesn’t say, "My last boss was an incompetent tyrant," they say, "I'm seeking a new challenge in an environment with stronger leadership." Likewise, when an interviewer asks, "What's your greatest weakness?" they aren't asking for a confession; they are testing self-awareness, so the candidate doesn't say, "I'm chronically late and hate teamwork," but rather, "I used to be a perfectionist, but I've learned to manage deadlines more effectively."

This is not inefficiency; it is a profound act of social grace, a high-level, multi-layered calculation of another's mind and our relationship to it. To reduce this intricate dance to a declarative meme or a summary isn't just simplistic; it’s a retreat from the very social cognition that makes us human. It is an intellectual secession.

This regression becomes a spiritual tragedy when we apply it to our deepest desires. If an elevator pitch can fully disclose our desires and their origins, then our desires are myopic. The greatest human desires: for love, for connection, for meaning are fundamentally unspeakable. Andrew Sullivan’s book, Love Undetectable, builds its central metaphor on this very concept. In the face of the AIDS plague, love was not a positive, provable, measurable fact. It couldn't be quantified, tested for, or summarized in a status update.

Love was, and is, "undetectable."

It is a signal that exists only in the negative space: the choice not to leave, the care given without an audience, the presence that endures beyond all reason, the "unsaid" commitment that is proven only by the absence of betrayal. This is a desire so profound it defies a sentence or paragraph. It can only be lived and witnessed, never adequately summarized. It is the absolute antithesis of the "newsletter."

And so we are left with a devastating revelation if a summary is what we choose to present, then we are seceding our humanity to best fit our 'newsletters'." This is the crisis. We are actively trading the "undetectable" for the tweetable. We are abandoning the complex dance of social cognition for the juvenile, declarative meme. We are replacing the analog, high-bandwidth signal of our lived, embodied, and often unspoken lives with the low-bandwidth noise of a curated summary.

We are not just sharing less of ourselves; we are, in the process, becoming less. We are seceding our own humanity, one update at a time.