A needlessly in-depth explanation of why I love writing.
To put it bluntly, I love writing because it’s an incredibly effective tool to communicate information. Allow me to explain with an unnecessary amount of complexity why such a simple premise holds such a large amount of significance to me.
Everyone has their own interpretation of reality throughout their day-to-day life. It’s ultimately based on the same information, but every mind processes that information in different ways. Different people filter out different bits of information, different people apply differing modes of reasoning, and everyone holds their own beliefs (and subconscious biases) on which factors hold what amount of weight in the distinct pattern of reasoning they may or may not choose to abide to. These different interpretations completely shape a person’s reality, and their mind in turn is shaped according to that. Though some people manage to hide it extraordinarily well, there’s a general consensus that we all possess some form of consciousness, but what’s less widely understood is that consciousness isn’t some single state of mind we all have in common, it’s actually an incredibly vague and broad term we’ve assigned to a phenomenon that doesn’t have anything close to a clear definition, or even any definitively agreed upon distinguishable characteristics. It’s an amusing coincidence that in an article about the supposedly magnificent capabilities of the written word my vocabulary falls short to what I’m trying to convey, but to my defense, I am treading uncharted territory here. To put it in terms I myself can understand, everyone’s iteration of consciousness, and thereby everyone’s version of reality, is (speculatively) a different implementation of what our brain is capable of, and every instance of “consciousness” is its own unique rendition — and they’re arguably fundamentally incomparable. There are interpretations of reality that are more accurate than others, and there are interpretations that allow for a more effective approach to accomplishing certain goals, but at the end of the day they’re still mere interpretations that are subject to subconscious influences, and one has very little control over how that interpretation initially forms or what it’s like in the present moment. In fact, I hold the belief that most people have but a negligible amount of control over how they process reality at all, and while I do believe that to be the root of the majority of all human conflict, I don’t believe anyone should be treated differently for it. After all, it’s completely outside of one’s own control, and it’d be thoroughly unjust to hold anyone accountable for something over which they haven’t had, or couldn’t realistically have had, any sort of influence themselves. It is, of course, more than just to judge and appropriately treat people based on the things over which they very much do hold control — that’s where personal agency comes in — but it seems I’ve wandered away from what I initially set out to discuss; the recorded word.
Language primarily serves as a translator between different minds. Most of us got at least somewhat familiar with a language before we could even have been aware of it, and it has never been easier to get better acquainted with one than it is in this day and age. It’s a very powerful tool, and it’s at everybody’s disposal. A language is an extended public library of terms that each describes a very specific concept that can be combined with other terms to together form incredibly detailed and elaborate sentences which, when properly utilized, can convey otherwise abstract thoughts with an astonishing amount of precision. Written language allows us to compose our words without the constraints of time, the observer’s influence (you can’t get affected by real-time feedback if there’s no one there to provide it), and contextual misinterpretations, and it allows us to do so with as much care and attention as we decide to put into it. The written word allows us to be infinitely more deliberate in how we choose to convey our thoughts than we would otherwise ever be able to. It allows for the utmost utilization of all that language is capable of.
Although there are still countless abstractions that language has yet to define, and there could exist countless more that may be inherently indescribable, words can be used to express concepts that would otherwise forever be confined to exist within the, what to anyone but ourselves would be innately untranslatable, intrinsic language of our mind, and they fulfill their purpose exceptionally well.
But as this article has undoubtedly proven at this point, that’s not to say something can’t stay incomprehensible even after it’s been articulated into familiar terms. But seeing how I didn’t expect anyone else to read this piece back when I wrote it, I can’t really fail to communicate something if that was never my intention to begin with.
