The Wit’s Guide To Shortcuts

Or, microefficient heuristics

Illustrator Diana Sperling recreating an 1816 shortcut through the mud

Everyone wants to cut to the chase and no one wants to cut corners. Therein lies the dilemma of the shortcut, a morally ambiguous way to avoid the long way around. Is it bad to get there faster? If you’re trying to buy a spatula in IKEA, do you really have to walk through the whole store? No. If you’re building a space shuttle, do you really have to check every O-ring seal? Yes. And if you’re not sure which situation you’re in, check if the restaurant serves lingonberry juice.

“Life is too short, and the time we waste in yawning never can be regained.”
— Stendhal

If you want to make a shortcut sound better, call it a heuristic. If you want to make a shortcut sound worse, call it a cheat code. And if you want to make a shortcut sound modern, call it a microefficiency. As per an article in The Guardian this week, random Britons are adding minutes to their lives by swapping out their shoelaces for elastic bands and drinking lukewarm tea on purpose.

“Here’s a good rule of thumb: Too clever is dumb.”
— Ogden Nash

If you want to make a shortcut sound dated, call it a life hack. Circa 2010, who didn’t want to hack their life? Sadly, most of these advice nuggets, like chicken nuggets, were made of pink slime. There are only so many uses for old toilet paper tubes. And now that vibe coding with AI tools has shortcutted software developers out of jobs, perhaps there’s a greater lesson: Eventually, every lifehacker gets lifehacked.

“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes. It involves Russia.”
— Woody Allen

Let me preface this next bit: A friend recently recommended an episode of The Ezra Klein Show to me and I told him it was like suggesting I try a cold intoxicating beverage they have called beer. Of course I already know! (Though for the record, I hadn’t listened to his Sarah McBride interview and it was quite good.) Anyway, on his last Vox podcast Klein gave this key piece of advice: Do the reading.

“You would just be amazed by how few people in life are actually doing the reading,” he observed. “All the way up the chain of success and prestige, how many people are just pretending to know what they’re talking about by relying on summaries of summaries, or the received opinions of their peers, or just their sheer capacity to bullshit.”

His point, which is as painfully obvious as looking at the sun, is that it’s not about “the argument or the information in the book” but rather “what happens in the time you spend engaging and wrestling with it.”

“There are shortcuts to happiness, and dancing is one of them.”
— Vicki Baum

The ultimate shortcut is to buy yourself the biggest and best cemetery plot right now — before prices go up. Then be sure to take the long way there.

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“I’m not a speed reader. I’m a speed understander. ”
— Isaac Asimov

Where do I get off, inveighing against shortcuts in a publication called Get Wit Quick? In my defense, this is a slow way to get wit! The very first issue of this newsletter appeared exactly six years ago today! And it’s unfurled every Thursday since, unhurriedly and unsurely picking the good lines, discarding the bad ones, and serving them up in 500 words or so. So, next week?

If Issue No. 314 of Get Wit Quick had a point, it would have wasted no time in getting there. The newsletter mascot is a magpie named Magnus after the magician in Robertson Davies’ Deptford Trilogy. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. No need to read it all, just tap the ❤️ and leap to the next vital task!

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For the brilliant people who support this newsletter at the low price of $30 a year, each week brings a smattering of topical lines for special occasions. This week:

One thing to say — and three things not to say — at a picnic.

Including what Hitchens really thought about lobster!