I want to say COVID played a sort of "black icing" on a couple-decade-old, increasingly fly-infested "work remotely cake". I've had far too much screen in my mental diet for far too long.
Another thing I realized is I'm more of what might be called the "longform tribe". So whereas those of a contrasting "shortform tribe" might love the heck out of txt messages and other assorted little blips/bursts of textural splatter, I nearly lose my mind attempting to navigate such - to me - context-less terrain. The blips seem not much more than sharp shards I mostly cut my ankles against than actually get any-communicative-where traversing.
While I'll of course miss places like this (especially the really quality long(er)form pieces), I want to get to the point where I truly don't even remember these screen-y portals to context-starved madness ever existed, happily perusing bookstores as though hunting beach gems again.
Well, and of course reading them.... :-)
In related news, I never really needed to know what most others thought anyway - not so much because I don't respect their opinions, but for just plain not having the mental capacity. Overloading my mind with lo-context-fi "burnt kernels" seems to bake its circuitry into a sort of silicon coma, culminating in a rather short queue (software sense) where it's all I can do to quickly browse the surfaces of its contained elements as yet another incoming pushes one I almost maybe sorta kinda grasped out the queue backside. I'm in a constant state of "but! but! but! but! but!..." whilst raising my hand in vain to hopefully get the attention of the element just about to go oblivion, followed by a head-down, shoulders-shrunk, face-side-to-side depression knowing I'll likely never remember that element again.
That situation is somewhat remedied when engendering sufficiently context-soaked engagement. But that's rare, and seemingly hard to find through the pixel glare - in quite stark contrast to how it is to sit in, say, a "beer garden", and leverage varieties of behaviors or stray phrases overhead (I'm a huge fan of serendipitous coincidence..) to strike up conversations causing each party to soon feel truly blessed to be alive.
I share some of your preferences, at least in terms of long-form vs. short-form. But I have to say I would miss the engagement of spaces like this were I to forego them entirely. I love reading books, don't get me wrong, but there's an inherent passivity there that means I could never subsist solely on them. Maybe if we weren't in the middle of a pandemic and I had more options for people to hang out with....