Comment by lurk2
2 months ago
> Before she started playing, she took a second to explain how love is in the air and in the trees and in the water. "And we're all, like, made out of water, you know!" she said. "And water is, like, you know, life!" It was one of the stupider things I'd heard recently, but it sounded familiar.
It’s one thing to be a blogger huffing his own farts, it’s another thing to be rude about it. The girl might not have been a philosopher, but when she was given a platform she said what she had to say; when the author of this article was given a platform he used it to publish a pointless, meandering essay operating under the erroneous belief that he was a good storyteller with insightful things to say.
By leaving out the following paragraph you're doing an injustice, framing a humorous anecdote as an attack:
>Then I remembered that I'd heard it before. A homeless guy had been saying this exact same thing down by the beach, although I had to admit the message benefited from the wireless microphone, the giant festival stage, and the thousands of screaming fans.
It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.
The author of this article is a solid storyteller who brings in a number of human elements that make it compelling. Meandering storytelling is intentional - this isn't an article for a scientific journal.
> It's a poignant observation about how similarly inane arguments are perceived as evidence of mental illness or deep insights based on the social perception of the speaker.
It’s not a poignant observation. This is the issue I had with the entire article; it was an uninsightful, unoriginal tweet that the author dragged out into more than two dozen paragraphs.
> The author of this article is a solid storyteller
I disagree. He’s using formulaic creative writing methods and came across as pretentious.
> Meandering storytelling is intentional
The meandering added nothing to the story. You summarized the entire post in less than a paragraph.
Writing isn't always about terse summaries of information. If you want that, have an LLM summarize it.
Good writing expresses concepts and ideas in engaging ways. You could write a few paragraphs summarizing theology, philosophy, and family dynamics that could be read in 10 minutes, but that doesn't come close to matching or replacing Dostoyevsky.
Doing everything as efficiently as possible misses the point. It's similar to how handwritten notes are slower but are retained more because of the process and taking the time to make them and read them.
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You missed the point of this text. It is not a scientific article, nor text pretending to be a revelation in any way. It is just a process or the episode of life, the author shared with us. And the writing (style) is excellent too.