I used to be someone that really put pressure on myself to focus and understand what it is a piece's author was trying to convey. Now I've stopped caring so mu

I used to be someone that really put pressure on myself to focus and understand what it is a piece's author was trying to convey. Now I've stopped caring so much, after reading beyond plenty of material from all over the spectrum (including the PIAAC's "Level 5," where the only difference between it and lower levels is that "Level 5" stuff is mostly the authors flexing their mastery over extraneous vocabulary, at the cost of "getting to the point," and succinctly presenting the "meaty core" of whatever it is they're trying to get across). Long words and sentences do not make for better writing. Sometimes they are warranted, but many times I simply skim over them, because it's clear what the author is trying to say, but he still wishes to self-fellate on how "nuanced" his views are (see: most geopolitical works). I have yet to come across a work where painstaking precision is warranted. That's not to say precision is unwarranted, but simply that the author hasn't taken any time to distill only the most important parts, and formulate a sufficiently brisk sentence to encapsulate the core of his thoughts (and let the reader's intuition fill in the gaps). Too much liberty is taken in rambling down winding paths, only to come back the other way, and leave me thinking: "what was the fucking point?" Most long works written today can be distilled into a pamphlet. And almost anyone who thinks his views are sufficiently nuanced, that they require long and tedious expositions is simply deluding themselves of their own self-importance (e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, is an apt example). Ideas are overrated. If they're self-evident enough that the intuition readily grasps hold of it, it doesn't need 300 pages to convince itself so. It's as if all that cruft is there only to distract you of how shallow the ideas are, and to trick you into thinking "wow, this is long and I'm having a difficult time really wrapping my head around it... surely this knowledge must be so advanced that it's worth the effort!" Even our classical thinkers suffer from this. Clauswitz's On War could be summarized into a single page; the rest is simply Clauswitz overestimating how much his ideas matter.