Sanjay Shukla

Building Patience in a Click-Driven World

What if the very thing you’re trying to escape—boredom, slowness, silence—is actually the key to unlocking sharper thinking, stronger focus, and a more grounded life?

In a world obsessed with speed, swipes, and surface-level takes, long-form content can feel like a quiet rebellion. It doesn’t promise instant answers or quick dopamine hits. Instead, it offers something far more valuable: the ability to sit with complexity, to think deeply, and to grow in patience—one paragraph at a time.

And perhaps that’s exactly why we need it now more than ever.

Let’s go deeper together.  Stick around —  it’s worth the scroll.

In an era where the average attention span has reportedly dipped below that of a goldfish, long-form content often feels like a relic—something quaint and indulgent, like handwritten letters or Sunday crossword puzzles. But here’s a quiet truth that rarely gets airtime in our feed-refreshed world: long-form content is essential for the very thing it promotes—patience and perseverance.

And perhaps that’s what makes it radical.

The Paradox of Instant Information

Today, ideas are served in 280 characters. Advice is packaged in bite-sized reels. Complex topics—whether geopolitical conflicts or ancient philosophy—are explained in 60-second clips. And while this snackable content has its place, it comes with a hidden cost: it atrophies the very muscle needed to digest life’s most meaningful insights.

Think of your brain like a muscle. If all it ever lifts are featherweight ideas—“5 Hacks to Be More Productive” or “This One Trick Will Make You Happy”—it will never develop the strength to carry weighty thoughts. And weighty thoughts are where transformation happens.

The Deep Work of Wrestling With Ideas

In the early days of my writing career—before smartphones lit up our palms every ten seconds—I interned under a senior editor at a health magazine. He once handed me a stack of scientific journals and said, “Find the story.” It was tedious work. I spent days combing through dense text on autoimmune responses and hormone imbalances. I remember nearly quitting out of frustration.

But in that struggle, I found a profound joy—the satisfaction of discovery, the patience to connect dots, and the humility to admit that understanding takes time. That single experience shaped how I approached every assignment thereafter. It taught me that some ideas require effort to access, and that effort is what makes them meaningful.

And here’s the thing: if an idea can be handed to you on a platter, it likely isn’t deep enough to change your worldview.

A Reader’s Journey: From Scroll to Stillness

A few years ago, I wrote a 3,000-word piece on chronic pain for a hospital group. It wasn’t flashy. No clickbait title. No GIFs. Just one woman’s journey from a debilitating condition to a manageable life with the help of a multidisciplinary approach. Weeks later, I received an email from a reader who had forwarded the article to her husband—also living with chronic pain. He printed it out. Annotated it. Took it to his doctor. That single article helped him ask better questions and, ultimately, choose a new therapy that worked.

That’s the power of long-form: it invites stillness, introspection, and change.

The Antidote to Dopamine Dependency

We’re living in the age of the dopamine loop. Every ping, like, or swipe is a mini reward that wires us for novelty and instant gratification. It’s a neurological trap—and it’s rewiring our brains in ways that make it harder to engage with complexity.

But when you commit to long-form—whether reading it or writing it—you’re doing something rebellious. You’re saying, “I will sit with this. I will engage. I will think.” And in doing so, you’re building patience, focus, and a decreased need for constant stimulus.

It’s like training for a marathon in a world obsessed with sprints. And those who can run the intellectual marathon will be the ones capable of navigating life’s more difficult, nuanced paths.

The Writer’s Responsibility

As content creators, we owe it to our readers to give them more than just sugar. We owe them substance. Not every piece needs to be long, but those that aim to shift perspectives, educate deeply, or inspire enduring change, cannot be compressed without compromise.

We must trust our audience enough to know they can go deeper—and invite them to do so.

In Closing: Wrestle With Words, Wrestle With Self

In the quiet of a long read, you’ll often find echoes of your own life. You’ll find arguments that frustrate you, truths that challenge you, and moments of clarity that stay long after the browser window is closed.

So go long-form. Wrestle with the words. Let them frustrate you, stretch you, change you. And in that wrestling, build something our world desperately needs more of—patience.

Because attention is not just a skill. It’s a form of love.