This is by the decadelong editor of The Guardian and is a very long but worthwhile read.

It does, indeed, appear that journalists have surprisingly similar views when it comes to news.

I have a confession to make. It has taken me years to write this article.

For a long time, I have felt that something was missing in the public conversation about human connection and community and how they are being eroded. And yet I haven’t been able to articulate it. Thinking and writing have become harder. It’s as if the neurons in my brain don’t connect with each other in quite the same way. I go to check a fact and get instantly diverted by a hundred other distractions on my phone. I find myself unable to devote time to thinking and writing like I used to.

It could be the relentless news agenda, but the news has been relentless throughout my 11 years as editor-in-chief of the Guardian. It could be age, but I’m not that old. It could be menopause, but I’m on all the drugs.

No, I think it’s because of something that many of us feel in this moment. That our attention spans have been degraded, our thinking skills blunted. That we somehow can’t concentrate or lose ourselves in a project. Finding myself stuck, as an experiment, I asked an AI tool to write this article for me, just to see what it came up with. The result was insufferably pompous and joyless. A reminder of the limits of this technology, for now at least.

In the end, I managed to write this article thanks to some serious interventions: the force of a deadline, locking my phone in a different room, turning off the internet. But what really got me there, got me to being able to say what I wanted to say, was talking it through with friends and colleagues. The answer to my writer’s block was in front of me all along: all I needed to do was to talk to other people.

As an opinion editor, I have some notes. This is a very approachable piece, but it veers into masturbatory. After 11 years, you should be able to frame this as larger than yourself.