The evolutionary history of writing and blogging.
Are you a happy blogger?
Rarely do I encounter a blogger who is completely content. You need motivation to struggle through various emotional states that affect the way you write.
Many times you feel alone. You feel the need to write and communicate, but nothing comes. You wait for inspiration, but it escapes you.
At other times, you enter the writing zone and find your flow. Writing is easy, enjoyable. You feel connected, sane, and whole. You see traffic and you communicate with your followers, on your blog and theirs.
In fluid sessions, writing is an adrenaline high that remains addictive, and you write. You forget to take breaks. You write too much. You write until you burn out with emotional fatigue, exhausted.
You burn out because writing is an emotional experience, whether you are aware of it or not.
Writing challenges your mind and emotional control. You become a true addict, chasing the last high. The blogging pushes you out of a consistent emotional state, swinging you from highs to frequent lows.
I have teared up before because the words would not come to me. I yell and kick things (not people). My worst emotional state with writing was several years ago when I was working on my masters thesis, and the words froze in my mind, and because of the pain the block caused, I turned away from the thesis altogether.
I abandoned writing for eight years, suffering with anxiety and fear always in the back of my mind. When you are blocked, the stress never leaves you, even if you turn to other activities. The empty feeling lurks deep within you, like a primal drive.
I thought that I had moved on after eight years in construction. However, building homes, in my case, was mind numbing, and depression sank in because I could not write.
I missed writing.
Just as you, I was drawn back to writing, to my addiction, and even now I experience time lapses when I can’t blog. Blogging is a rough emotional experience that you work your way through, a tortured existence.
The reason you endure? You care so much about communicating through written language that you can’t stay away for long.
This is an evolutionary pull, drawing you to record stories in writing, an emotional drive that has pushed humans to write for thousands of years.
The ancients were the first to feel the impulse to record, with cave paintings that told stories of hunting, surviving, and living. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics are among the first forms of writing, emerging over 5,000 years ago out of complex picture driving.
Think of how long 5,000 years is. No wonder the need for writing is so deep within you.
Language and story preservation is now a part of the human mind, continuously evolving, sometimes dying out with a culture. Not all cultures have written, but since 3,000 BCE, the civilizations that thrived were great writers.
Bloggers are courageous evolutionary fighters who continue to write, even when their fingers are bloody. Whatever the obstacle or emotional conflict, we persevere. We return every time to the intimidating blank page, struggling to string words into chains that please ourselves and engage readers. We continue in the human tradition to write that began as cave paintings thousands of years ago.
The evolutionary impulse to tell, write, and record stories
Writing evolved from ancient oral storytelling and the desire to preserve stories for future generations. Cultures would have designated storytellers who were responsible for remembering and telling stories of the past and present.
The storytellers were regarded highly in the community. This is where the emotion in blogging comes from, both a need to tell and read stories, beginning with pictures.
The evolution of culture is tied to written language. A primal, evolutionary instinct within bloggers pushes them to write. They write out of an evolutionary longing to pass knowledge to future generations:
Writing has its origins in the strip of fertile land stretching from the Nile up into the area often referred to as the Fertile Crescent. This name was given, in the early 20th century, to the inverted U-shape of territory that stretches up the east Mediterranean coast and then curves east through northern Syria and down the Euphrates and the Tigris to the Persian Gulf.
The first known writing derives from the lower reaches of the two greatest rivers in this extended region, the Nile and the Tigris. So the two civilizations separately responsible for this totally transforming human development are the Egyptian and the Sumerian (in what is now Iraq). It has been conventional to give priority, by a short margin, to Sumer – dating the Sumerian script to about 3100 BC and the Egyptian version a century or so later.
You write emotionally because of your evolutionary drive to communicate stories in writing, to preserve knowledge. This is your role as a blogger. You have embraced the role of the ancient, oral storytellers.
Blocks and frustrations occur because you are passionate about this drive to communicate. It is how humans survive and thrive, advancing technologically through the use of enduring written language.
Writing and other visual systems such as tokens, painting, sculpture and carving can record ideas externally to human memory, and so they can be used to extend the range of knowledge possessed by a group. Unlike speech, however, writing is not instinctive; all human cultures have speech, but many did not or do not have written languages.
Be courageous because the job you perform is important
You help to elevate culture with your blogging, and the need you to communicate, tell stories, and write will never leave.
Writing is difficult because it requires the most complex and intricate thinking and motor skills humans possess. When you can’t write, you feel the pain of an unfulfilled duty, instilled in you from more than 20,000 years of evolution, first in spoken stories and then in picture form.
Embrace your evolutionary responsibility to advance human culture, a burden that is sometimes difficult to manage, causing intense pain. But press on, for yourself and civilization.
As a blogger, be a positive force in the evolution of the greatest activity on earth. Keep writing because humanity depends on you, and hold yourself responsible to write, whether you feel like it or not. Your unique perspective is essential to our thriving civilization.
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Originally published at www.zipminis.com.
