Why Write?

Nobody is forcing me to, so why bother?

I made a big fuss last week about struggling to write, so why bother?

Billions of people on earth don’t write, and many of them turn out fine.

There isn’t a prose-shaped void in their soul.

If it’s so hard, and it’s just a hobby, why write a personal newsletter on Substack?

Paul Graham has a great piece in which he claims you haven’t really had a fully fleshed-out idea unless you’ve written about it. I’ve found that to be very much true.

But more specifically, writing in public forces you to do two things:

1. Have ideas

2. Refine ideas

When you set a goal to write every week, it changes the way you look at the world. You start looking for stories and ideas. Trying to find where ideas intersect and how they apply to what you’ve been living through.

What are the consequences of AI chat apps that take the place of friendships? How do I deal with getting older when being young is part of my identity? Why do I like playing tennis?

If I’m not careful, these questions can come and go in the span of a 15-minute car ride home.

But when I’m looking for ideas to write about, I grab these questions so I can wrestle them into an essay.

That’s the hard part.

Once I sit down to write, it forces clarity. What do I actually think and what am I going to do about it?

Our minds excel at making us think we know everything about a subject when we really only know a small part.

If someone quickly asks me why I like tennis, I might respond with a generic statement about how fun it is and how it keeps me in decent shape. But that’s a very surface-level answer.

If I put my answer into the form of a 500-word essay, I’m forced to go deeper.

Maybe it’s because I miss the structure of sports that I grew up playing. Perhaps it’s the concrete way tennis measures success compared to knowledge work. Or maybe it is just really fun. I’ll let you know when I finish that piece.

Go back to your college days. Did you ever sit through a lecture, confident you were taking in every word the professor said, then found yourself unable to explain the lecture to someone the next day? You were so sure you understood the subject, but when somebody put you to the test, you couldn’t articulate what you learned.

Most of my pieces start out this way.

I think I want to write about X, and then I sit down and realize I don’t really know what I think about X, or how it relates to Y, and when it should be included with Z.

Then, I have to sit and think about those problems, research, come up with potential solutions, and then try them.

I can’t just write an introduction; I also have to write a conclusion. And that forces me to come to some sort of endpoint to my thoughts.

If I’m not careful, I’ll let life happen to me without ever giving it a second thought. So I write to force myself to question, to learn, and to take action.

There are other ways you could do this outside of writing, and this isn’t a persuasive essay on why you should start a personal Substack.

But if you did, I think it would work well for you, too.

Let me know if you start one,

Alex