There Are Never Enough Ideas to Read And Write About

Photo above by Christian Velitchkov at Unsplash

Some people seem to believe, for some reason, that technology has replaced human writing. They believe that we should humbly place writing on the shelf as something to do "for fun". A recreational activity. We’ll just write to benefit the humanities, keeping the serious research to generative technology.

I think that is a dangerously presumptuous supposition to make.

They are making the argument that we should all continue to write. That much I agree with. And that’s about it. These people can’t see the wool pulled over their eyes.

Their case for human-based writing is usually made with the following caveats:

• "It's what makes us human."

• "It's how we connect and have fun."

• "It's how we communicate."

• "Mankind has always liked to share stories."

This is not to say that these points are wrong. Writing does make us human. It is how we relate and communicate. And yes, mankind likes to “share stories”. However, making these arguments are not necessary.

It is not the arguments that they make. It two nihilistic presumptions that you read writers continuously make on platforms like Medium:

1. There is too much content and too much to read.

2. “Everyone’s artificially generating content.”

Neither of these points need to be argued because neither of them are true. There is not too much content on the internet. There is not too much to read. “Everybody” is not artificially generating content.

See, this is what they believe. They see this world where there is this huge fish net of content hanging from the sky, packed full of wet articles (they call “content”) pulled from the ocean. And this big thing of content is being placed over our heads like we have to read it all and watch it all.

Number two, most people do not read things that they believe are artificially generated. So why are we behaving as if they do?

Marketing people who believe that generative content sells do not understand why people read, watch, or do anything.

They believe people are essentially dupes.

In a recent interview with Farnam Street, Rory Sutherland made a comment about how companies who automate customer service do not understand how people think. He’s right about that. And neither do companies who believe that they can automate generative content. Combine that with the content that humans are making and they say “there’s too much content”. If there is too much content, then how is the solution to generate duplicitous content?

This writing apocalypse has a solution to these pessimists—write just for the fun of it. Throw on some chamomile, look out into the great wide open, and write for yourself.

Writing is More Than a Human Recreation

Yes, writing is human.

Then what

There is something more revealing, and simultaneously disturbing.

It is that these people actually believe that mankind does not need writing anymore.

That is why they believe that we should just sort of allow the writing apocalypse, but that we should continue to write to keep the humane heart central to society.

It is similar to how sports announcers can't explain why sometimes the underdog wins. So, they usually say, "He's got a lot of heart."

In sports, having “heart” is a trophy to an unnamed athlete.

It’s not meant to be derogatory. Yet, it's not necessarily a compliment either. It's damage control. It's because sports advertising spends a lot of money marketing people to tune in and watch athletes who are bigger, younger, faster, and more talented than the average individual.

It has to do with the fact that writers are not being honest about why we write. And, more importantly … why we read.

There are mechanics to writing  than merely just "communicating" or "making human connections". "Sharing our hearts" and other such reasons. These reasons for writing sound emotionally agreeable. Somthing that we can all meet in the middle on. However, they are forgetting about some more important things.

Writing is the contribution to a complex system of social and civil commentaries and record-keeping, that emerges to create a grand human record of what it means to be in a particular period of time, or to watch one era of time emerge into a different era. Future civilizations can watch past civilizations try to point out political, social, and epidemiological deevlopments—good and bad—and how they manage them. Through writing. It is the basis of peer review, and in my opininion, the basis of all writing.

Writing is not only necessary for us. It's necessary for the future. And, it's also a prudent civil duty to share observations, knowledge, skills, in our different industries, and to realize that everything is connected in a way.

The Recreationification of Writing

Why must 21st-Century humans reduce everything that they’re good at to a mere recreational activity?

Why was a musical instrument a career for Beethoven, but a pastime for us? It's simply reductionism. Things are as important as they are in measurement to our awareness of the big picture —something they call "metacognition" —or, the awareness of how something small fits in a bigger paradigm, to the point where the small thing becomes an actual skill.

When we continue to write, we become aware (or cognizant) of a world beyond that from which we were aware of when we started writing.

Hence, the network that is established through writing was the "internet of ideas" before the internet was invented. It is a system, and we can't really change a system that forms as a direct result of a natural environment. It forms itself, and is autopoietic. This "writing network" just is because it is a part of adapting and interacting with our environment.

Writing emerged from written language, which emerged from ideographic symbols.

It is correspondence between the ancients and the modern age - and yet, a correspondence among ourselves. It is where the ancient and the modern converge to form research, study, and understanding of the world.

"There's too much to read."

Why write? Isn't there too much to read?

There isn't too much to read.

That's like saying that there's too much water to drink because one could not possibly drink all of the water that exists.

There's a reason for too much water. Because there are a lot of needs for it. It is essential.

It is needed for hydration. For hygiene. For the atmosphere that needs water. Plants need it. Animals need it. Insects need it, too. It serves a purpose beyond you. Beyond me. Somebody out there is swimming in the water that you don't swim in. They're drinking water that you'll never drink. A power company is using water to spin turbans that power homes that you don't live in, in neighborhoods somewhere else, for people you you'll never know, and workplaces you don't work at. Does it overwhelm you? Is it "water overload"? We should be glad that there is so much water to go around.

Water is 71% of the earth's surface. It may seem a bit hyperbolic, but you're probably not going to drink most of that 71% of water, and you're not going to sail on all of the 352 quintillion gallons of water in the ocean. To sail every molecule is not the purpose of water. The water is there for mankind.

Just because there is a lot of stuff to read, doesn't that you're going to read it, or that you even have to.

People build ships, boats, and canals to use for travel and resource from the vast abundance of water that occupies the deepest trenches of the world. And yet, there is never too much water.

So, there isn't "too much to read", and I've written several articles about content overload and how to deal with it. You deal with it by realizing that you're not going to read every single article or book that ever gets written. So relax. Pick the ones you want to read. Should that keep you from writing?

"There are too many doctors" has never kept people from going to med school. Why? Every town not only needs one doctor, but several of them.

Freedom of the Seas

Information is water. When we talk about information and how it moves, we call it "the flow" of information. Even information in the form of data (the breadcrumb of information) is said to be streaming.

Each writing is someone's small part of the sea. You are free to sail on it, or swim in it. But you don't have to. You are always invited to contribute any time you want.

We then carve canals into the land so that the information can flow to other communities. They can become aqueducts where information flows and "irrigates" the soil of society.

Writing Is an Ancient System in Motion

Each time we write, we are networking and interfacing with writings that go back for thousands of years, referencing old texts, manuscripts, parables, fables, records, and old maps.

We need to show, in some way, that there is a new thought to something that was written before. Or, that something that was written before can be used by us to form a new thought. That's the way it operates.

Every era needs people to record what is going on. Maybe one day, it will be a historical relic that tells future civilizations what this civilization is about. Whether it's 70 years from now, or a thousand.

Journalism is a record of things that happen around the world, and sometimes in different industries. Fiction is a fictional record that reflects the real world and reconstructs it into a story where we can learn something about ourselves … or better yet, the civilization.

It's not about connecting with people and expressing ourselves. It's about being record keepers. It's about being problem solvers, and collaborators.

The internet has allowed us to link these things together more efficiently. They are literally called links.

There is a quantum entanglement to all of our articles, books, magazines, journals, encyclopedias, dictionaries, lexicons, and bibliographies. It is a system and people can try to change that system, but it is a system that goes back for centuries now.

Big-Picture Thinking

Each piece is a link to the big picture. Through the collections of articles throughout the decades, we can pinpoint a problem of an era. That even a Buzzfeed article has figured out that people have been writing about how "nobody wants to work" for 125 years.

This helps us look at contemporary problems that cycle such as "mean world syndrome" and believing that people are lazier than they have ever been. These ideas are never anything new. Rather, they are cycles and if it wasn't for someone referencing the problem in their age, then we wouldn't be able to compare it to today.

And when someone says "we don't need to write anymore" - which is ludicrous  -  you may retort "Aha. But writing is about human connections and relating to people."

There's so much more to unpack.

Writing isn't just some sculpture. It's more than just "hey look what I made".

Whenever you write something, ask yourself the following questions:

• What does this say about my civilization?

• What does this say about society?

• What new problems have emerged and what are my solutions?

• Will this article or book be beneficial for now or for future generations?

The book How to Win Friends and Influence People was published in 1936. Even though it contains information that tells us a lot about the time period it was written in, it contains timeless advice that is always actionable. In fact, if you have read this book, then you have ready merely any book on social ethics. However, things change and new contributions are needed. Such as social media, political strife, screen time, and pandemics that keep us from going out and talking to people.

Writing is more than a work. It is an artifact of history that goes into detail about a civilization's problems, observations, and solutions. We look at old magazines from the 1940s to understand what 1940s life was like in a particular country. We can't say whether everything published in the media throughout the ages is true. We can say that it had an effect on people.

Through our writing, our journalism, or the fictional stories of authors, we take dominion over contributing a slice of our understanding of the world for now, and for future generations. It's a work in progress. And, that work is still in progress.