Why I Write
Title inspired by George Orwell’s “Why I Write”.
Any pursuit for the sake of itself prompts intense scrutiny as a rite of passage, and this one shall be no exception. It is for a good reason: it helps clarify indirectly, whether the time spent on the endeavour is worth it. Let’s take our turn to answer the dreaded existential question: what is this blog’s purpose?
My purpose with this blog is twofold: there’s the satisfaction of producing something publishable for a broad readership; and secondly, there are some things that need to be said that only my most fervent fans deserve to read.
With microblogging being the norm today, it feels like an uphill battle to be writing. But that’s the beauty of pursuing hard things - while you feel a gnawing pain in your temple that your median life is devoid of, it presents an opportunity to you to differentiate yourself. And as it eats away at your brain, the usual train of thoughts arrive questioning whether the time spent on it is worth it. That is the great filter, where the 99% are sifted out.
Now you might ask, what do the 1% get? Excellent question. The answer: they discover something magical about writing.
Although writing itself can be rewarding, the magic of writing is not in the written word. Its what the written word makes possible. Writing frees up the mind’s cognitive reserves to engage in a more valuable pursuit, namely, critical thinking. This coupled with the additional working memory on your paper (or computer for that matter) makes writing an effective tool for reflection.
Paul Graham talks about the something similar in his post about putting ideas into words.1 A good writer doesn’t just write, he discovers a range of ideas when he’s writing. The beauty of the process is that reading what you’ve written many times over(obsessively proofreading when you write is pretty common) is what creates an exacting effect - half baked ideas become concrete.
And thus, this blog.