An Alternative Purpose of Writing
Most people start writing for all the wrong reasons. Usually, the first things that come to our minds are recognition, fame, and finally money. But these are second-order effects. Even if we discount that thought, the thing that comes after is the romantic idea of the creative pursuit. We can’t blame them. It’s how the act of writing has been portrayed for ages.
However, there’s more value to writing than what we know. Our minds work in ambient mode. When you write something, you are unloading your mind of nagging thoughts that take up space and time. Additionally, they prevent any new thoughts to arrive.
Here I want to talk about two objective aspects of writing which are as important as their subjective counterparts in popular literature.
Writing for personal peace
When we write something down that leads to an intuitive explanation or a logical conclusion, something magical happens in our minds. Something instantly resolves. There is no more nagging. It almost feels mystical. A sense of completion and release bestow upon us. Our brains automatically start looking for new ideas.
Progressing in life means progressing in the quality of our thoughts and worldview. We can only build upon our thoughts effectively once our existing thoughts are in a quasi-equilibrium state. When multiple strains of thoughts drift around without any goal in sight, the friction created in the mind hinders all action. Write for more action.
Writing lets our minds create space for new thoughts to arrive. People who don’t clear their heads systematically deal with high levels of mental conflicts. They live a life of stagnant thoughts and ideas. Just like the soil has to be plowed over and over to grow a new crop with quality, our minds also need frequent flushing of thoughts.
By not jotting down our thoughts, we create a knot in our minds that just sits there and takes space. Over time, it grows to several knots, unresolved, and finally, it becomes knots of knots. Then comes a time when our ideas are so messed up that we take extreme measures to reset our life – which leads to precarious results.
So, the knots must be resolved periodically. We can’t stop our thoughts from arriving, getting mixed up, and creating conflicts. But we can resolve the knots. And it’s not only a chore, it’s about discovering latent knowledge that reveals itself. That which you didn’t know existed there.
We underestimate how our psychological conflicts hamper our daily lives. There is a constant battle that goes on between our will to express and our monkey mind to suppress. The will wants to expose the ideas out from our minds into the world so that they can replicate as a meme. The will is an invisible force – it wants continued existence at any cost. Spreading ideas is one of the best ways to achieve this.
Other the other hand, our monkey mind wants to avoid any internal or external conflicts. Its primary motive is to maintain our sanity in the short term. It doesn't care about the will. The immediate purpose of the mind is to maintain life in the current moment. Hence, it tries to suppress any thought that may hinder its ideal state.
Writing is the opposite of meditation. In meditation, you try to observe whatever thoughts arrive and try to reach a state of acceptance. In writing, you try to string your thoughts to form some meaning for yourself. Meditation helps you learn about your inner world, whereas writing helps you learn about the outer world. It’s a way of harmonizing the gap between your thoughts and the reality of the world. It is a way to reflect on the temperament of the society and get useful feedback in return – so that we can refine our thoughts and build new ideas upon them.
Writing as a service towards the future
We shouldn’t write what’s already been said. Instead, we should write about what’s going on in the world – that hasn’t been articulated yet. Something which is still not a clear idea. Something which you can’t name by a single word or describe by a single sentence.
For example, not until 2 decades ago, the idea of product-market fit was non-existent in the tech ecosystem. Marc Andreessen popularized the term – although it was invented a while back by Andy Rachleff and Don Valentine. Today, you can’t begin to talk about any startup without using this term. Writing should invent new and useful vocabulary to help us understand the changing world better.
This also implies that sometimes original ideas originate in a single person’s mind. The related phenomenon might already exist in society – still, missing from the common language. Note that it doesn’t take only a single write-up to grow a complete tree around an idea. Rather, it helps in planting the first seed. Until the idea comes into the public domain, it remains latent. Only after careful analysis and criticism, the idea starts to get attention. You shouldn’t be discouraged by the fact that there will be multiple iterations before the idea comes to fruition. If the idea is original, it will come back to you. You have to take the chance and wait with patience.
Every new era destroys and amends the ideas of the previous era. As a result, society plows through the uncharted territory of hazy ideas. Independent writing provides the knowledge to search for fertile land to sow the seeds of new ideas. Writing prevents the wholesome history from decaying. In this age of ephemeral information, written works that are published have become more important than ever. These will help build the ideas of the future.
Well-written independent pieces are like hooks to the discourse of a certain time. Not the ones printed by newspapers and magazines. They are a better proxy for the collective mood of that epoch. Just like a good voter turnout in an election hints at a fair mandate, publishing your thoughts is better for the overall public discourse. It acts as an antibody against any biased idea or agenda to become mainstream. A good piece of writing saves people’s time otherwise spent wandering between clickbait and mediocre pieces. It gives other writers a solid base to stand on – to write about their ideas. It provides a critical missing piece in the puzzle.
In Closing
Every time you publish something, you might be lifting an unknown number of people out of painful solitude. There is something that gives them hope about their life after reading a great essay or account of someone’s life. Seen in this view, writing acts as an antigravity against society’s collective sinking in the abyss of solitariness.
I don’t want to lecture you on your moral duties, but if you think you have original thoughts that haven’t been said yet, you ought to write them down. You owe a debt to future generations. There must be a higher sense of purpose to this, in a metaphysical sense.
As soon as you publish something out of your mind, you create a different world than what would have been if you didn’t publish it. Writing creates matter, while not writing creates antimatter. At any instant in time, people are divided between different ideologies. They exist in distinct bubbles in the realm of ideas and public discourse. An original idea published in the public domain acts as a bridge that brings all those bubbles together, ultimately shattering their walls.