TLDR culture isn’t killing creativity, it’s just demanding better
In researching and preparing for writing this article, I have taken 2 TikTok breaks, scoured through websites on what the best ground coffee is for my new machine, FaceTimed a friend, texted my mum and considered cooking dinner. My tea is sitting next to me, stone cold. I have at least 20 tabs open on my laptop that have little to no purpose, and I have music playing out of my TV via YouTube titled “You’re the baddest villain in the world”.
That is to say, beginning this article, I am not without blame. None of us are.
Living and breathing short-form media is in the very crux of almost all young adults’ personalities. In recent years, we have found ourselves surrounded by dopamine hits in as many forms as there are flavours of Coke Zero. We exist in a society that requires information to be condensed and hit with shock factors in order for it to be interesting. Lectures get treated like podcasts to consume passively; books sit on bedside tables and shelves gathering dust as our thumbs develop new muscles through speed scrolling.
Speaking directly on TLDR culture is both sickening and realistic – TLDR stands for “Too Long; Didn’t Read”, a four-word sequence condensed into four letters for either the ease of communication and typing patterns or for the ease of the short-form media mind.
In researching for this article, I came across one written by Markus Brinsa called “Gen Z, AI and the TLDR culture”. This article is a 17-minute read, and even with the intentions and purposes of researching and writing, I had to actively force myself to read every word. Embarrassing, I’m aware.
But this sort of attitude to long-form media types is prevalent in every single facet of day-to-day life, especially in a university setting. Who wants to watch a 90-minute football match when there’s a guarantee that 40 seconds of pure highlights will be released not even an hour after? Our lives are dictated by trying to get our money and time worth out of everything we apply ourselves to, so much so that we’ve lost the value of hobbies, of habits, of pastimes. What do we even do with all this time that AI, Google, and laptops afford us?
We don’t do anything, is the simple answer.
But another layer is, do we have the choice?
I would argue that the obsessive nature of this habit is not something we can help. As I illustrated at the beginning of this article, it took genuine force for me to pull myself away from my phone screen – the ease and rhythm of short-form media is an addiction for our age group and society. Even the structure of writing that we find easiest to read is in short, snippy paragraphs, peppered with dashes, short sentences, and capital letters, all designed to capture our focus as much as possible.
Why? Because we lose it, habitually.
But this isn’t an invention of the tech-neck-riddled Gen Z. It’s been building for decades.
Take the soap opera.
Short episodes, easy-to-follow storylines, and a presence in the household daily for decades! A walking advertisement for people who don’t ‘have the time’ to sit down and watch a full film, but will sit down 6 nights a week to watch Corrie. And how many shock twists and turns does Coronation Street have to be filled with for audiences to be satisfied? Soap operas and sitcoms were previous generations’ answers to TLDR culture, so is our generation truly to blame? I don’t believe so.
And when the soap opera wasn’t enough, reality TV arrived – people deliberately dramatising their own lives so that we stayed interested. Our brains, blameless and lusting for further dopamine hits, were structured by the leaders of magazines, TV channels, and media moguls that craved attention so keenly they had to come up with fresh new pages, formats, and people!
Brinsa argues “the appetite for depth isn’t dead; it’s just competing with a lot of junk food”, but framing this as a uniquely current problem misses that it’s built over generations. There’s no simple fix. Is it a lack of agency, or something we’ve inherited?
Our brains are structured in a way that means we crave instant hits of dopamine, but this is not to the detriment of society, and this is not something that can be fixed by our parents’ generation saying, “Go outside and read a book”. Were they reading books? No, they were watching blurry Duran Duran music videos on MTV.
So, if we’ve inherited this wiring, what have we done with it?
What Gen X fails to recognise is that we have rewired this condition for dopamine dependency into something distinctive: extremes.
This want for extremes feeds into the content we consume, driving it to be high quality, entertaining and consistent. TLDR culture can be criticised to some extent, but a want for a certain standard of media does not quash the creativity or depth of society, I’d argue it improves it.
Being hit by 100 shots of dopamine daily from the age of what, 13, has shaped us differently. The depth of our obsessions, our stages, the extremes we throw ourselves into. It shocks older generations because they don’t recognise the surface. But it’s the same behaviour, rewired.
Today’s lawyers, doctors, psychologists, personal trainers, all with over 50k followers on Instagram and leading double lives as content creators, highlights the strength behind the dual mindsets of Gen Z. The only issue with TLDR culture is that standards have been raised, something doesn’t have to just be long and critical for it to be up to par; Derrida doesn’t cut it anymore.
TLDR culture highlights the value of structure, of succinct readings, writings, and working. That’s not a lowering of standards – it’s a demand for sharper ones.
A drive for high quality and an increase in standards doesn’t challenge or diminish creativity; it champions it. Gen Z has fashioned a working, learning, and creative lifestyle, arguably through TLDR culture, that prioritises maximising their potential.
TLDR: not a knife to creativity and freedom, but a piece of constructive criticism on raising the standard of the media we produce.
