If you think this is bad writing (because it doesn't make a productive use of audience time), the article has a piece of advice for you, "Put away your self-help guides, and read a novel instead."
Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling.
You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).
This is just another comment in the fetishization of everything long. There's nothing particularly grand about anything being long. Timecube is longer.
I have 50 years at best left to live. This isn't competing with self help. This is competing with the best books of all time so it had better be good.
Strongly agree. Most articles I come across could be summarized in bullet-point style. How many articles are there that couldn't be compressed in 5-10 bullet-points, each containing a short sentence?
Like a novel, the reading of an article is meant to be an experience. It follows the "show, don't tell" dictum pretty well. The critique of perfectionism hits at you viscerally, instead of being an academic argument. That good writing necessarily requires a more productive use of audience's time (or follows some economics of the form of insights communicated/time spent), is the optimizing/perfectionist thinking that Ms. Schwartz has taken aim at in her content. So the form follows content in a way. The writer feels that in today's self-improvement culture, we do not appreciate something for its own sake. For example, when we read, we think of "what is it saying? Why does it not say it quickly?", rather than imagining possibilities, chewing on the words of a sentence, or relish the turn of phrases, or appreciating the metaphors employed to communicate a feeling.
You do seem to be right in suspecting that you are wrong about the article. Her concluding paragraph, for example, states that the one should be able to enjoy experiences for their sake alone, rather than the sake of self-improvement. "Things don’t need to be of concrete use in order to have value." This is contrary to the assumptions shared by the two self-help books you allude to: The Shallows and Deep Work. These argue for disconneting FOR the sake of having some value in the dimension of self improvement: for being able to improve the quality of your work (Deep Work), or increasing reading comprehension, e.g. (The Shallows).