(or: What Zenon Taught Me About Breaking a Thousand-Page Story Into Bites That Still Burn)
Yes, the students are still with me.
Which, in the era of TikTok, is the academic equivalent of levitation.
So when I looked around the lecture hall, I realized I wasn’t teaching a class —
I was trying to hold attention hostage in a room full of minds trained to swipe every three seconds. Yes! Attention is the new currency. And mine was on the verge of hyperinflation. So I did what any underpaid Deadpool with a PhD would do: I wrapped a brutal 20th-century history lesson inside stand-up, sprinkled it with sarcasm, and sealed it with a pop culture GIF no one saw coming.
And it worked. Kind of. Because here’s the thing: they’re not stupid. They’re saturated. And saturation behaves a lot like indifference — but faster.
And I — poor me — have a story to tell.
Not a story. A monster. Spreading across more than 100 years. With conspiracies, suicides, fake revolutions, real disappearances, and a cast of characters that includes at least three versions of the same man. Basically, it’s The Odyssey, if Odysseus had Wi-Fi and a surveillance file.
So how do you tell an epic to a generation trained to scroll?
How do you narrate something vast — to minds engineered for fragments?
My answer: Live Infinite scroll-fiction.
Or, if you’re feeling philosophical: The Zenon Approach to Storytelling.
So who the hell is Zenon?
No, not a lifestyle brand.
Not a DJ.
Not a supplement you buy at 2AM when you’re Googling “brain focus hacks”.
Zenon of Elea.
Ancient Greek philosopher. Inventor of paradoxes. And — hear me out — low-key the patron saint of every writer trying to finish something that never ends.
His most famous trick?
He proved, with a straight face, that motion is an illusion.
Here’s how it goes:
Imagine Achilles — the fastest man alive — racing a turtle.
He gives the turtle a head start. No big deal, right? He’s Achilles.
But here’s the catch: every distance can be sliced in half.
So before Achilles can reach the turtle, he has to get halfway there.
And before he gets to halfway, he has to get halfway to halfway.
And so on.
Infinite halving. Infinite steps.
Which means that, in theory, Achilles never actually catches the turtle.
Because every time he reaches where the turtle was, the turtle has moved — even just a little.
Speed can’t beat infinity.
Zenon broke motion with math.
Repeat this forever.
Because between any two points, there’s always another point.
Every distance contains another, smaller distance.
And if you divide reality enough times, you never actually arrive.
Boom. Paradox.
Motion dies. Infinity wins.
And that — in a weirdly beautiful way — is how I tell my story.
I don’t aim for the ending.
I live in the in-between.
Every chapter is a halfway point that never stops halving.
Zenon storytelling = fractal fiction
= narrative sliced into sharp, dense, addictive shards.
Each fragment is self-contained.
Each fragment secretly contains the whole.
A history lecture becomes a monologue.
A monologue becomes a meme.
A meme becomes a moral wound you weren’t expecting.
Because if you can’t hold their attention with one long story,
give them a thousand sharp ones.
Like micro-cuts.
Like amuse-bouches for the soul.
Like paradoxes wearing TikTok makeup.
No, I’m not dumbing it down. I’m cutting it differently.
This isn’t dilution. It’s distillation.
This isn’t surrender. It’s sabotage from within.
So yes, I write infinite scroll-fiction.
Not because I love the scroll.
But because I love the story enough to meet the reader where their thumb is.
📜 The story is long.
📱 The world is short.
🧠 So I serve it fractured.
Each piece a trap.
Each line a lure.
And if I do it right?
They won’t even realize they’ve read the whole thing.
Until it’s too late.
Andrei Jebeleanu 