Why reading online feels exhausting (and what to do about it)
Most articles aren't long because the ideas are complex. They're long because the internet rewards length. Here's why online reading feels so heavy.
If you finish a single news article and feel mentally tired, you are not imagining it. Reading online in 2026 is genuinely harder than reading a book or a magazine was twenty years ago — and it has very little to do with you.
The internet rewards length, not clarity
Most online articles are not long because the ideas are complex. They are long because length is rewarded — by ad slots, by SEO heuristics, by time-on-page metrics. The result is an internet full of padded intros, repeated points, and "in this article we will discuss…" filler. Your brain has to actively skim past all of it to find the one or two sentences that actually matter.
Information overload is real
The average knowledge worker now reads the equivalent of a short novel every single day across email, Slack, news, and work documents. That's not a productivity problem — it is a reading overload problem. No human attention system was built for that volume of unsorted text.
Context-switching makes it worse
Every tab, notification, and "related articles" sidebar pulls your attention sideways. By the time you return to the paragraph you were reading, you have lost the thread and have to start over. Multiply that across a day and you spend more time re-reading than reading.
How to read less and understand more
The fix is not to read faster. The fix is to read less — to strip articles down to what they actually say, then read that carefully. Tools like ReadLess exist for exactly this: paste any article, get the key idea, the main points, and a TL;DR in seconds. The article you actually want is usually about four sentences long. You just had to find them.
See how ReadLess works or explore use cases for students, professionals, and ESL readers.