Is it better to go deep or wide?
Do I have to choose?
Conventional writing advice, especially for today’s online spaces, is that it is better to go deep than go wide. Niche down. Choose a lane and stick to it. Become the expert on growing tomatoes in a greenhouse or parenting children with ADHD or leaving a cult or fill-in-the-blank here and write only on that. Except I have never loved that advice. My interests are varied; I like newsletters that talk about favorite bath products one week and a relationship epiphany the next. So I am going to keep ignoring the recommendation and sometimes go deep and sometimes go wide. Sometimes I will consider huge, hard things and sometimes I will delight in the little, frivolous things.
As we emerge from the pandemic, I notice that we seem to be losing the capacity to go deep. There were many awful things about the pandemic, but I heard nearly everyone (except first responders) express some sort of gratitude for the forced slowing down. People searched for hobbies and leaned in hard. They learned everything that there was to know about making sourdough bread or observing birds or mastering jigsaw puzzles. Many of us had the time and space to give ourselves over fully to something and become absorbed. There is something magical about becoming lost in a pursuit that brings joy or challenge or maybe a little bit of both.
But then life began to pick up speed again as the virus became endemic. I say this not to romanticize the pandemic—I would never wish a pandemic on anyone—but to recognize that life has shifted back to “normal” again. All of those things that people said they wanted to stop doing? Meeting after meeting? Driving in lots of traffic? Racing from one thing to the next? It all has happened again. Most of us, myself included, are in the thick of things. It feels good to have events and gatherings to write on our planner pages again and reasons to anticipate a future many months out rather than living and making decisions day by day. The lessons we all said that we were going to take away from lockdown did not stick, though. We are doing so, so much again. We are going wide, not deep.
Again, wide can be good. Wide makes us all interesting. We contain multitudes. I often think that my profession (a priest) means that I am a jack of all trades, and master of none. Dabbling a little in a lot helps grease our social wheels so we can relate to one another. We can make connections between seemingly unrelated things. We can ration our energy.
However, if we only go wide all the time, there is no depth, no lasting pursuit, no purpose. Why are we doing what we are doing, and does it satisfy us on a deep soul level? I am convinced that we are only beginning to discover the evils—and I use that word deliberately—of social media and short-form content. Information comes to us in soundbites at an impossible-to-consume speed, and slow, considered work is disappearing. Thankfully some journalism platforms still produce longform articles, and Substack is trying to recapture some of the focus on writing from the old blogging days. Choosing to produce and consume in an unhurried, careful way is practically countercultural.
My word for this year is “slow.” I have embodied this vision with mixed success. It cuts against my nature to purposefully slow down rather than chase efficiency. Yet I am finding myself asking the question more and more often, “What am I trying to get to? What am I rushing towards? Why do I need to move so fast?” It seems to me that depth and slowness go hand-in-hand. When I slow down, I have time to notice, absorb, digest. Ironically, when I move slower, time feels more plentiful because I am engaged in the present moment rather than thinking about what comes next.
In the end, I don’t think it’s about choosing between going deep or wide. We need both—the breadth that keeps us connected, curious, and playful, and the depth that roots us in meaning and presence. So here, in this little corner of the internet, I want to practice both—the deep and the wide. I want to leave room for whimsy and wonder, but also for wrestling with the questions that take time to unfold. Because both matter.