Can I tighten up these articles?
Absolutely.
I can make them shorter. I can strip them down, clean them up, and measure every paragraph down to the millimeter of available text space. I can make each article deliver one clean point, remove every detour, and get the reader in and out as quickly as possible.
Is that how I do things?
Fuck no.
That is not how my mind works, and it is not what I want these articles to accomplish.
Sometimes the purpose of writing is not simply to deliver the goods. Sometimes the purpose is to get people outside the box they have been sitting in so long that they no longer recognize it as a box.
Because when you cannot separate yourself from a thought long enough to examine it, you become trapped inside it.
You are no longer studying the problem. You are participating in the problem while trying to solve it.
That makes it much harder to see the exit.
Sometimes you have to remove yourself from the equation. You have to step away from what you believe your role is, what you believe the situation requires, and what you believe the available answers are supposed to look like.
Once you do that, you may discover that you can accomplish much more than the narrow task sitting directly in front of you.
You may even find the answer to a question you were not asking.
And sometimes that unasked question is the important one.
People can spend enormous amounts of time, effort, and money trying to solve the wrong problem simply because nobody stopped long enough to question the original premise. They keep asking how to make the existing process work better instead of asking whether that process should exist in its current form at all.
That is why I do not always write in the shortest possible line between Point A and Point B.
Sometimes I circle the subject.
Sometimes I approach it from the side.
Sometimes I pull in an experience that initially appears unrelated. Sometimes I follow an idea farther than a tightly edited article would normally permit.
That is not always accidental.
Discussing something from a different point of view—or even discussing something that appears completely removed from the immediate situation—can help loosen up the mind. It creates distance. It changes the frame. It allows you to examine the problem without constantly reinforcing the assumptions that created the problem in the first place.
People get mentally blocked when they concentrate so intensely on one question that they stop seeing anything outside its borders.
At that point, more concentration does not always produce a better answer.
Sometimes it only produces a deeper rut.
Walking away from the question, changing the subject, telling a story, examining a parallel situation, or letting the mind wander can bring you back with a completely different understanding of what you were actually trying to solve.
Will everybody want to read that kind of article?
Probably not.
Will everybody want to listen to a long discussion that occasionally wanders outside the neatly painted lines?
No.
But not everything needs to be designed for everybody.
Some people want the answer immediately. Some people want the three bullet points, the summary paragraph, and the clean conclusion.
Other people want to examine how the answer was reached. They want to see the side roads, the failed assumptions, the contradictions, and the unexpected connections that appeared along the way.
That is often where the more valuable material lives.
So yes, I could make these articles shorter.
I could tighten every sentence until there was nothing left except the direct point.
But sometimes the direct point is not the only point.
Sometimes the wandering is what helps somebody discover the question they should have been asking all along.