Why I write, and why you should too!
Probably not a surprise to anyone who knows me, but it's not to make money. Writing is much more valuable than that!
When I was a kid, my mum used to quote Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux1, usually making the point that we hadn’t really understood the thing we were trying to explain. I used to dismiss the comment exasperatedly, as you do at that age, but it seems the phrase stuck in my mind:
Ce que l'on conçoit bien s’énonce clairement,
Et les mots pour le dire arrivent aisément
I found countless translations but none would rhyme and flow as well as it does in French. Here’s my attempt at the impossible task of translating poetry:
What is well understood can be stated clearly
And the words to express it also come easily
What this poetic sentence captures well, is the idea that finding the right words to express a concept requires it to be clearly understood first.
Whenever we discuss beliefs, ideas or opinion, we often only hold a shallow understanding of something that has several degrees of complexities and nuances. That’s not been helped by Twitter being limited to 280 characters and the fact that we are bombarded with hundreds of those facts and figures on a daily basis.
This is where writing comes into play!
When it comes to the topics that you care about and that you want to have a clear understanding of, there is no better exercise than writing about them. It’s a fantastic way to formalise your thoughts, to challenge yourself, your pre-conceived ideas and biases. Writing is thinking!
Just a few days ago I read this:
Writing isn’t the transcription of ideas from your consciousness to a physical page.
It’s the creative process that transforms fragmented thoughts into cohesive stories.
This was #1, write for yourself, for better thinking!
Secondly, there is a quiet revolution happening. The initial hype of AI has died out but it has not reduced it’s overall usage. Not a topic for today, but Artificial Intelligence is progressively making it’s way into crucial areas of society such as education or policy making. Yet, algorithms do not learn exactly like us. They crunch through huge volumes of content or data points, and they form a pattern-based, averaged-out view of a subject, should it be what a cat looks like or whether the war in Ukraine is justified. Human beings have the ability to critically discard content, benchmark against their value system, create additional ideas and synthesise into a new, improved and updated view point. For now, it is still very unique and missing in the way current Artificial Intelligence works.
The issue is that if there is a bias in the data, this bias will be learnt and applied without any value judgment. Feed the AI enough right-wing racist prose and it will be engrained into it’s model of thinking (actually that’s sadly close to how people work too).
The point here is that there are more angry people creating huge amounts of biased hate-fuelled content on social media than there are well-intended writers creating thoughtful and balanced articles. We need more of them!
That’s #2, feed the AI for a better future!
Finally, written words are timeless. What we think comes and go, what we say might be heard in a transient way, or not… What we write is an imprint of some thoughts, even if imperfect, they are akin to fossilised ideas, ready to be unearthed later on.
Reading someone’s content is a window into their mind and their life. Reading your own journal might help you realise how much you’ve grown or how you were worrying about the wrong things.
I personally suspect writing provides some relief to the existential angst of our finitude. The thought of those words surviving the mortal shell does give me some comfort… Deep thoughts aside, short of downloading your brain to the cloud, the more content you leave behind, the better trained the AI-based virtual you2 will be trained!
Even if those chatbots never get used in the future, I would really like to read content written by my grand-father or great-grand mother. If you have kids, it at least opens up the possibility.
That’s #3, write for posterity, just in case it cares…
And yes, I quite like writing, pleasure is a big part of it. I also earn some money from readership, to be fully transparent it probably just pays for the coffees I drink whilst writing. It’s not impossible, but for most of us, writing is not going to be a bread-earner!
I hope this will inspire you to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard.
A 17th century French poet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolas_Boileau-Despr%C3%A9aux
The chatbot that’s nearly undiscernible from you might already exist https://medium.com/@mariusursache/the-journey-to-digital-immortality-33fcbd79949