Nancy Kline
AUTHOR

TLDR

"Too Long Didn’t Read”

You have a message. You look at it. The message is long. You are a breathlessly busy person, so you don’t take three minutes to read it. Fair enough. But you also do not take three seconds to send a holding reply like, “Thank You Will Reply Soon.”

You just write: “TLDR.” Too Long Didn’t Read.

Seriously?

​

Do you do this? Or do you know anyone who does?

I just came across this thing, this profane four-letter word less-ness. Is there a horizon of communication cruelty out there that I have not been seeing?  There must be. I am not on a single social media platform (expressly because of their built-in pulverising of civility, of hearts, of thinking, of real connection). So I have 100% not been alert to the increments of viciousness, to the stealthy proliferation of pain-installing dialogue that group facelessness can produce.

I think my TLDR outrage in this moment is a bit like my arriving in Los Angeles in 1968, having lived all of my 18 years in the blue-sky purity of New Mexico, and feeling an anvil on my chest, only to be told it was smoke and fog, recently termed “smog,” that had, over many years, saturated the air because of our cars, and was now in my lungs.

You’re kidding.

TLDR is that shocking to me. Literally – I could barely breathe yesterday when I saw it for the first time.

And I remember wondering in that Los Angeles moment how Karl Benz in 1885 had not been smart enough to ask himself the “Then What?” question. How did he not factor in toxic emissions before the first car left the drawing board? Or how could Henry Ford have in 1908 not asked his considerable self questions about poisonous fumes before he dumped on the nation millions of Model Ts from his ingenious assembly lines?

I remember wondering why when, 35 years later, the sun began to disappear in California and the coughing began, the manufacturers of cars did not say “sorry,” and address smog immediately. How, in fact, they denied it. How it took another 30 years before even the catalytic converter was invented, and 26 years beyond that before enough law suits and regulations finally curbed emissions density and toxicity, and the California skies reappeared. How? How could it have taken so long?

I am sitting here today “coughing.” How, I wonder, did our messaging each other become so toxic? How did Neil Papworth not see this coming with the first text 33 years ago? How long will it take to stop it now? Can, in fact, anything be done? Where is our verbal catalytic converter? Where are our regulations?

​

Unfortunately there are no catalytic converters for this “machine,” except us. There are no regulators except us. We are the sources of action here. We need a human outbreak of civility. An agent that enters the heart and makes it care how people feel when they receive messages, what happens to their self esteem and joy and ability to think for themselves and to walk tall after they read them.

We need to produce a transformation of consciousness that somehow convinces everyone to be kind. All of the time. Even when we encounter evil as we see it. Even when we are riding through the night to rescue the children we were from the dangers that lure. Kindness must become our regulation.

Please tell everyone you know that they are better than TLDR; that they do have three seconds to send a holding reply; that time is all they have, in fact. The rest is all made up. And what we make up – how we behave with each other – needs to nurture so that the time we have can nurture us.

But if you are desperately, excruciatingly, look-at-me busy and have lost the capacity to write sentences, at least try this:

TYWRS

​

​

​

​