Why Write?
I have been away from writing for a while. I started writing online about 4 months ago with good intentions and published almost daily for a good 2 months before my wife came back from her studies in the US after almost a year.
And as soon as she landed, I put everything aside as I prioritised spending time with her over anything else. So even writing took a backseat over watching Netflix with her as we tried to compress a whole years worth of spending time together into just 2 months.
I kept telling myself I’ll pick up where I left off as soon as she goes back. Problem is, she left on the 2nd of July and today’s 15th of August. A full one and a half month ago. And I’m not sure I can still say whether I am picking up where I left off or starting from scratch.
Feels like the latter.
Why didn’t I start earlier? I think its mostly because I didn’t see the point. It had been sometime since I stopped and there wasn’t a lot of progress to show for it. I got distracted by the numbers game, never got over the imposter syndrome.
But today, I finally gathered the courage to pick up the slack and start writing again, and the best way I thought would be by reminding myself why I started writing in the first place.
It started when I came across this unassuming article by one Shane Parrish where he asks —
“Why write an essay when you can type a few words and have AI generate one for you? Why write an email when AI can auto-respond for you, in a better way than you.”
And he answers with the following suggestion —
“Writing about something teaches you about what you know, what you don’t know, and how to think. Writing about something is one of the best ways to learn about it. Writing is not just a vehicle to share ideas with others but also a way to understand them better yourself.”
Writing requires the compression of an idea. When done poorly, compression removes insights. When done well, compression keeps the insights and removes the rest. Compression requires both clear thinking and understanding, which is one reason writing is so important.”
In a world of average writing available on demand, the signal-to-noise ratio will change for the worse. Information will become even more of a substitute for thought than it already is.
Many things can be done by tools that write for you, but they won’t help you learn to think or understand a problem with deep fluency.
But you need deep fluency to solve hard problems.
A world where common thinking is available on demand will tempt people to outsource their thinking and disproportionately reward people who don’t.
In the future, clear thinking will become more valuable, not less.
Writing doesn’t leave bad thinking any place to hide. Good writing requires clear thinking.
So it seems like the more important question to ask myself is — Why not write?
