This morning, I abandoned another newsletter halfway through.
Not angrily. Not because the writing was terrible. Honestly, the opposite. The person writing it was thoughtful and clearly cared about what they were trying to say. The topic itself was interesting enough that I clicked immediately and started reading without hesitation. For the first few paragraphs, I was fully there with them.
And then somewhere in the middle, something loosened.
I got distracted for a second and clicked another tab. Came back. I reread an entire paragraph before realizing nothing had actually settled. Kept going. Drifted again. Returned one more time. Eventually I found myself staring at the screen with the strange realization that I no longer cared enough to keep holding onto the thread, even though some part of me still wanted to know where the piece had been trying to go.
I’ve been thinking about that feeling all day.
Because I don’t actually think the problem was bad writing.
In fact, I think this happens constantly now. Newsletters, articles, Substack posts, news stories, long Instagram captions, Medium essays. I start reading, genuinely interested. Sometimes even excited.
And then the connection quietly weakens until staying with the writing starts requiring more effort than the experience itself is giving back.
Not because the ideas are wrong. Not because people are unintelligent. Usually the opposite, honestly. Most of the writing I abandon belongs to people who are thoughtful and observant and trying very hard to communicate something meaningful.
Lately I’ve started wondering if the internet has misunderstood this entire experience by reducing it to “attention spans.”
Because I don’t actually think people are incapable of depth now. I think people are exhausted. Distracted. Fragmented. Emotionally overloaded. Reading while half-holding six other thoughts. Opening articles between appointments. Returning after interruptions. Trying to re-enter conversations after losing focus three separate times already.
And under those conditions, communication starts functioning differently. The writing itself has to emotionally connect to the reader a little more carefully.
Not through manipulation or louder hooks or artificial urgency, but through something much quieter and harder to describe. A kind of emotional continuity. The feeling that someone is still carrying you forward sentence by sentence instead of leaving you alone to bridge the distance yourself.
The strange thing is, once you recognize the feeling, you start encountering it everywhere.
You can feel the difference between writing that gently keeps reorienting the reader and writing that accidentally races ahead without realizing the other person lost footing two paragraphs ago.
Sometimes the ideas themselves are intelligent, but the experience of moving through them slowly becomes effortful in a way the writer probably never intended. Other times, someone begins explaining before enough grounding exists for the explanation to fully matter.
Eventually, the thread simply loosens.
And honestly, I think this is part of why communication fascinates me so much lately. Not persuasion in the loud internet-marketing sense. Not “how to hold attention” in the algorithmic sense.
I mean the much quieter human experience of what it feels like to stay connected to another person’s thinking long enough for meaning to fully arrive.
Because people don’t move through communication mechanically.
They move through it emotionally. They need moments of orientation. Small places for the nervous system to settle. Tiny signals that reassure them they still know where they are inside the conversation and why it’s worth continuing.
I think this is also why visual pacing matters so much online, even though people often dismiss it as aesthetic preference. A thoughtful subheader. A little breathing room between dense sections. An image arriving at the exact moment the reader unconsciously needs a pause. Even paragraph shape changes the emotional experience of reading more than most people realize.
None of that is decorative to me anymore.
It’s part of helping another human being stay connected to the thread.
And honestly, once I started noticing that, I couldn’t stop seeing it everywhere.
xx,
Amy
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