Please scroll to the bottom of this email. But also, please don’t. There are seven new fall classes down there, that we’d love for you to see, but asking you to scroll so quickly past paragraphs of text feels off. Which is why this piece, is about that very urge to rush.

Every other week at Green Door, we send out a long-form newsletter. We call it the e-newspaper. It’s a longer story, about a topic close to our hearts, written in a glaze-over-worthy serifed font we chose a year ago. It’s a format that’s supposed to invite you to linger in your inbox just for a bit. But we often find that reflective cadence doesn’t always sync with the perceived urgency of the announcements we have to make: new class listings, the opening of our permanent location, the kind of news we really do need you to see in order for this whole folk school experiment to keep going.

This week is one of those weeks of dissonance. We have seven new classes to share with you, what we’re calling our fall season. And yes, they’re tucked so far down in this email, a couple big scrolls down, so far, in fact, I found myself wondering: Should we stick a jump link at the top so people can get to the “good part” faster? Should we flip the format entirely and let the essay trail behind the real reason people opened this? Should we just cut this story?

The questions of how we package our news pointed to something bigger. We’re operating a folk school inside a culture that treats attention as a commodity–what a paradox.

In 1971, economist Herbert A. Simon described the concept, the attention economy. “A wealth of information,” he wrote, “creates a poverty of attention.” The more places there are to look, the less we truly see.” He was right. Our inboxes are overstuffed and our feeds truly never end.

Today, attention is more valuable than money. If you can capture it, you have influence and you have power. And so, as creative people we find ourselves constantly designing for ease: less friction, more immediacy. We abbreviate our communication, shorten the paragraph or flatten the nuance. We assume readers won’t finish a long sentence, let alone get to the end of a newsletter piece like this one. We trade time for efficiency. We shrink movies, truncate books, distill images into one-second flashes. Creators of media, of physical objects, and ideas, feel this pressure daily: to deliver faster, to get to the point, to serve the algorithm.

But folk schools aren’t built for that. Coursework at a folk school asks you to wait and sit with discomfort. They encourage you to notice what happens, the amount of time it takes, the connection you feel to nature, when you carve a bench with your own hands instead of buying that wobbly one on the internet. That act, and folk school learning more broadly, might even be described as inconvenient. We’d take that as a compliment.

In a world obsessed with speed, where immediacy is flattening creativity, culture, and ecosystems, slowing your scroll, and choosing the longer route, is a kind of resistance. Inconvenience and that, at times, aggravating slowness–it is the point.