Tolkien's not a specialist in scintillating dialogue, but he's not bad at it either, in the archaic style he favors, and the "meaningless details" you so dislike are much of the substance of his work—one suspects, based on your description, that the problem here is more your attention span coupled with a general lack of exposure to classic English literature. Anyway if you want snappy dialogue read some Wodehouse.

Yes. The proliferation of mass technology, especially digital media, is poisoning something at the heart of what allows people to make good art—something that has to with the way we relate to our narratives, personal and collective, own and other.

It's not just books; every creative field is suffering in this way except arguably television, which is holding on longer than the rest, to a large extent by cannibalizing resources from them (books, music, etc.) as they deteriorate.

You're being downvoted because Reddit, but yes, there's something incredibly lazy and cruel (not to mention antithetical to therapy, which it waters down to the point of meaninglessness) about the blunt-force way therapy-speak is wielded in the TikTok era.

One strongly suspects pertinent details have been left out of this account.

For one thing, those aren't opposites. And that italicized "purpose" elicits what we used to call "douche chills" back in the day. Whatever you're reading, it sure doesn't look like a great use of time.

Lack of sleep + high-grade marijuana is an excellent recipe for making bad things worse. All things considered, sounds like abstaining for a good while might be in your best interest.

I mean, that's like prime Ali vs. teenage, pre-Cus D'Amato Tyson. Make it Das Kapital, now...