Make It Shorter

Make it shorter.

Shorter…

SHORTER!

We’re in a world where everything is being shortened as our attention spans also shorten, but which came first? The chicken or the egg?

In this case, I think it was the shortened stuff. Yes, we have a natural inclination toward short form, hence its effectiveness, but I believe that we started shortening things and it revealed these truths about ourselves.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about lambasting short-form content. It 100 percent has its place and it needs to be made. Things that are overly long and gratuitous for the sake of themselves are just as much of a problem. Self-indulgence is not a good look for content creators. But we’ve gone from making some things shorter to making everything shorter.

These days, everything is about the swipe. Instant gratification. Stopping the scroll. Probably because we’re no longer forced to watch what’s being made available to us on a TV, and we can pick whatever we want, when we want. So the only way to guarantee that we’ll get a view is to make it shorter, more aggressive, to rage-bait, or whatever will keep people from moving their thumb.

I’d argue that a lot of news segments are perfectly fine being short. Quick advertisements that don’t feel like ads are another great opportunity to shorten things and make them functional. So yes, for advertising, keep it short. If someone’s forced to watch it, don’t make them resent your brand by over-indulging in length. Get to the point.

But in this never-ending chase to make short-form content the priority, we’re losing out on the humanity of storytelling.

We’re cutting down explainers until there’s no room for someone to actually walk us through their thoughts. We’re cutting narration until every breath, pause, and natural moment of hesitation vanishes. We’re squeezing deep ideas into 15- or 30-second social videos, not because that’s what the story needs, but because that’s what the platform seems to reward.

And then we wonder why nothing seems to feel good anymore.

Maybe this is too “old man yells at cloud” (it almost certainly is), but I think part of our overall frustration with the digital world isn’t that we’re just existing digitally. We’re existing digitally while we view digital representations of people that don’t feel like people anymore. They’re electronically modified to fit into preconceived windows of time where we think we’ll either keep people around for viewership or readership or lose them completely.

No, you can’t bury the lede in a news story. The structure there, and in most content, should usually be “most important details first,” followed by weaving in the increasingly extraneous story moments as the segment continues. But we’ve come to the point where we don’t even keep the less important bits around, despite those pieces of context or humanity being key to actually giving people information or value from the content.

Instead we think, “Ah, that’s useless, people won’t watch it. If we leave it there, they’ll just scroll instead of giving the reel a chance to repeat and snagging an extra play on the metrics.”

And that’s where the problem lies.

Shorter is not always better. Sometimes shorter is just less.

Honestly, for storytelling in particular, I think we need to lean further back into longer pieces of content. Longer stories and better pieces that make people think, feel, and relate (maybe without even directly selling something, aka, blasphemy to marketing departments). Can long-form advertisements find a place too? Yeah, probably, but those really are more of a short film, and they have to punch people in the face with feelings to work.

Which is kind of the point. Feeling takes time. Context takes time.

Trust. Takes. Time.

A person sitting in front of a camera, thinking through an answer, pausing before they say the thing that matters, that takes time too. And if we cut every pause, every breath, every moment of hesitation, we may technically make the content tighter, but we also risk cutting out the part that made it feel true.

I don’t think we should be so afraid of long shots, long takes, or even long pieces of content, so long as the content deserves it.

Look, I’m self-aware. I’ve always needed an editor to shorten my content, and maybe I am too into the long stuff. Maybe I let things expand TOO much, breathe TOO much, and grow into too many directions. I need to shorten what I create, for sure.

But in all the time that I’ve been producing videos, the content that gets to people and actually makes them feel something isn’t usually the stuff built only for quick hits of dopamine.

It’s the stuff that breathes. That feels human.

The stuff that builds upon itself and gives people enough time to settle into the thought, the person, the story, or the moment.

Short form has its place. Advertising needs it, social platforms reward it, and some information is better when it gets to the point quickly. But maybe everything doesn’t need to be shaped by the swipe.

If we keep aiming at shorter and shorter content for every part of our lives, we’re not just changing the format, but we’re changing the kind of attention we’re asking people to practice.

Which is probably what bothers me the most.

There’s a reason the Stoics and other philosophers harp on patience so much, because patience does make us better. It makes us better listeners, better observers, better storytellers.

Better people.

Short-form content as the default trains us in the opposite direction.

So yes, cut the excess, get to the point, respect people’s time.

But don’t cut out the breath just because the platform taught you to be afraid of silence.