I have spent the better part of my life either learning how to write, or learning how to direct my reading toward that which has been written well. By a great gift of random chance, I have not paid the slightest bit of attention to whether what I write and read is catchy — whether it grabs the interest of potential readers with sufficient quickness and force to induce them to continue reading. It has come to my notice that catchiness seems to be of paramount importance to most consumers of the written (or sung) word, and I am going to do something about it powerlessly point out why this attitude is ultimately fatal to progress.

If you insist on limiting your idea diet to fast food, you will starve.

Note that I do not continue the analogy by saying “you will have serious health problems and die a little younger,” as is the case for anyone still ignorant enough to eat McDonalds every day. Literal fast food does at least contain some protein, vitamins, etc. — enough to keep you alive and “well” for a good long while. The damage to your body is slow, cumulative, and mostly reversible.

This is not so when it comes to feeding your mind: most of those with the current capability to read are already long-dead, with essentially zero hope of resurrection. The damage done to your brain by depriving it of real nourishment is cumulative, but surprisingly quick and – in the absence of dedicated, well-trained care – inherently irreversible, for the stricken develop a strong repulsion to the only cure. They wander about spouting “TL;DR” as if that fixes everything, contributing nothing but noise to the human symphony — zombies in a garden.

Of course, mere length is no indicator of literary quality. If not for one unfortunate fact, the length of a work would be utterly independent of its merit. That fact is that some ideas are simply too complicated to express succinctly in the languages we have (rather accidentally) developed. If you insist on brevity, all such notions – some of them beautiful, some profound, some absolutely vital – are forever beyond your experience, and thus your comprehension.

This leaves open the possibility that a catchy introduction may well deceive the reader into sufficient loyalty — that if enough interest is aroused early on, potential beneficiaries will stick around long enough to get a whiff of the real content of a writing, possibly even finish it. I do not think this happens more than one time in a hundred. You see, there are only a few gimmicks that readily grab a human’s attention, all of them visceral in one form or another. Each of these gimmicks – sex and violence among them – either wears off quickly, or causes fixative repetition of thought. In neither instance will a prospective reader actually pay any attention to the writer’s real message, which of course must follow the gimmick for the gimmick to be thought necessary.

If a book, or a song cycle, or whatever sort of work you encounter, fails to interest you, this is not an indication of the work’s deficiencies. Think of it as an indication that, thus far in your life, you have been conditioned to reject either the specific message being conveyed, or the concept of sophisticated messages in general. Should the work truly turn out to be garbage, that can be found out soon enough — but if it’s merely uninteresting, give it a chance. Most diamonds are not on the Earth’s surface.

If you insist on that which quickly appeals to you, you have stopped growing. Odds are you are already all you will ever be.