Why Writing Matters & What Writers Produce
Mind Viruses and America.
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What Writers Produce and Why Writing Matters
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
- John Maynard Keynes
In a world of billion dollar startups, salsa parties and sunny California skies, why sit in a room and write for hours?
What purpose is there to typing out line after line on a computer for hours on end with little to economic payout now or in the forseeable future? Wouldn’t I be better off building a company that I can cash out on? Dancing on a bar floor with a cute somebody? Walking around with my friends around Dolores Park?
Why write?
Organizing Your Thoughts
The world continually moves toward enabling you to do greater and greater amounts of work.
Your ancestors took carriages to make dangerous voyages across vast distances to other towns. Your parents discovered the joy of lifting a handset and hearing their loved one’s voice on the other side. You trudge thru TSA with your socks on and fall asleep watching Dune on your iPhone & Airpods while the Pacific Ocean passes underneath you.
This is known as technology. But technology alone is insufficient; there remains a cost to develop, build & maintain those planes.
Capital then is the ability to leverage technology to your will (i.e the plane ticket). It’s the mutual understood language that moves planes, shifts nations and guides people’s behavior.
But if technology is the plane and captial is the cost of a plane ticket, what then is the destination?
That is determined by you; your wants & desires.
The issue is your wants and desires are effectively infinite; we can watch a Instagram Ad and immediately want something. But the physicial world is finite. Therefore as technology and capital simplify & reduce the world’s physical constraints, what you get ruled by is what you choose to value.
Put another way, as the ability to do great work increases per individual, what you choose to work on matters more and more.
Writing forces you to untangle the mess in your mind and create a cohesive narrative out of your thoughts. And when you publish pieces in the world, this triggers a feedback loop where others weigh in, encouraging a greater refinement of thought. It both forges and refines your thinking as a vehicle for shaping your mind.
Collectively these create your beliefs and govern how you make decisions.
The Bat Signal: Finding Like-Minded People
The Internet is effectively one giant matchmaking engine.
Because writing is a relatively high effort activity compared to say snapping a photo on Instagram or doing a Tiktok dance, it acts as a bat signal; attracting interesting people and repeling others. Generally more people will get turned away but those that filter thru, you’ll resonate with on a incredible level.
Joy of Sharing
Admittedly, it’s quite hard to write if you don’t enjoy sharing your thoughts. I take a certain subtle pleasure in crafting a story from observations and thoughts of the world. Sharing my thoughts is sort of like discovering a cool bug on the playground as a kid and calling over your friends to check if out.
OK but can’t you hone your thoughts by chatting with friends and meet like-minded people in-person? Aside from personal benefit, what do writers provide for others? I mean, the cafe down the street provides damn clear value.
$$ for food = yummy breakfast egg burrito in my mouth.
But no one can’t eat my words, so what do writers objectively create?
The Mind Virus
Have you ever been chatting with your friends, and when you ask them their opinion on something, you hear them spout an oddly familiar phrase? You pause for a moment and realize you’ve heard it before. It’s from a book! Or that one news anchor, a well established author or a social media influencer.
That’s a mind virus.
Ideas that spread and quietly infect people who then go on to internalize it and spread it to others. Some know the origin and others believe it came from their own heads.
Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.
- John Maynard Keynes
Even now, I’m sure that this is some weird mix of things I’ve read and consumed with a dash of my personality thrown in. We all do it. And these ideas then create beliefs that shape our actions.
The belief you’ll be arrested for shoplifting prevents crime.
The belief in the American dollar is why everyone agrees to carry colored pieces of paper in their pockets and exchange it for breakfast egg burritos.
The belief in a little bit of code called Bitcoin drives people to deposit their paychecks, making its market cap equal to 2,222,222,222,222 Twinkies.
Now, everyone creates and spreads mind viruses. We do it, consciously and unconsciously, whether we debate on the blue-or-gold dress, our sense of humor or even our opinions on Alicia Keys’s Super Bowl concert.
These viruses are neither good nor bad; the Founding Fathers’ mind virus called The United States of America has been evolving and spreading over 200+ years.
Writing is just a more intentional version of creating a mind virus.
What matters is what kind of virus.The heart of every great invention, every great work of art, every accomplishment, has originated from curiosity. The ability to ask, “Why?”
“Why does there need to be a king?” Enter democracy.
“Why does amber attract feather when rubbed with cat fur?” Enter electricity.
“Why does fungus kill bacteria?” Enter penicilin.
And so, that is why I write. To exercise my curiosity but to continually infect others with some sense of curiosity of the world around them. To ensure that in a world so full of weirdness that we can remain interested in mireless fractal of human existence from the global to the personal.
- Kiran
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“Independently owning your garden helps you plan for long-term change. You should think about how you want your space to grow over the next few decades, not just the next few months.” - a history of digital gardens by Maggie Appleton
“this dovetails in sinister fashion with the basic idea that any sufficiently advanced technology cannot be distinguished from magic. highly evolved capitalism becomes such a technology and the largess and plenty it produces gets mistaken for a property of the universe rather than a made thing, a thing that must be created rather than simply reaped.” - In a time where we’re disconnected from how supply chains work, Doomberg’s Where Stuff Comes From is a eye-opener. Highly recommend.