Writing Atrophy
I wrote about how hard writing is before, but I realized things were not always this way. I found it much easier to write, perhaps even easy to write in other times of my life, specifically middle school. I should understand why if I wish to write more.
I mainly think it is:
- I'm not reading as many books as I used to
- I'm more self-aware than I used to be
The first point is actually not completely true. I am reading probably in total the same amount of text if not much more, but the quality of that text is lower. It's tweets, blogs and comments which are on average, of much lower quality both in terms of ideas and literacy than books.
What does your mind eat?
It is said that you are what you eat. Well then equivalently you think what you read. And what is the spirit of a person but how they think?
It is an unfortunate state of affairs that the majority of information we consume is coming from platforms which are incentivized to capture human attention and lock it for as long as possible for ad revenue, using whatever means necessary.
And probably we should be worried about this.
If you're thinking without writing, you only think you're thinking.
— PG
In a world where the majority of essays will probably be written by AI, I think it is actually a matter of life and death to be in the minority that hand-writes their essays, lest we delegate even our critical thinking to AI. I feel some amount of alarm and urgency about this.
In high school, I remember finishing the trilogy of the Lord of the Rings, and being so inspired by it that there were constant images, plot lines, and stories I would imagine. So much so that I'd fill up entire notebooks with maps of alternative fantasy worlds.
It would appear that I even tried to emulate Tolkien naming conventions for cities and regions. That was the extent to which I adored these books and fine-tuned on them.
Looking back at my old Google Drive dump, I had been straight up writing pages and pages of high fantasy! I have no shame. Here is an unfinished work from 2013 which means it was written by my very charming, 10-year-old self.
As a past-time, I'd even written stories collaboratively with my friends, hundreds of pages together. Yeah maybe it wasn't the best, there were plot holes or whatever but the truth was that I was moderately prolific. What the hell happened?
Kids don't care
The other advantage I had as a child was that I didn't care all that much about what other people thought. I never thought or worried for a second that what I was creating was cringe. Perhaps I didn't really know what high quality was.
Now I think I have a better sense, well I have some internal sense of taste. And a constant desire to do things well. In a word high standards for myself. Typically a good thing, but it also means that there's a constant silent audience and critic in my head.
In a sense, I understand why this happened. Writing fell off entirely from high school onward as more time had to be dedicated to "real world" goals like getting into university, and then university meant finding jobs, working on projects related to my career, etc.
I've still maintained some childhood passions, like music for example. But writing is one that I've lost. And like a muscle, it has nearly atrophied away from disuse.
Well no longer I say! I would love to write fiction again (alongside other things). Though at this point in my life I think I have graduated from high fantasy and on to science fiction. And what stories I should be able to write now with the knowledge of five years of undergrad in CS and industry experience.
Lego ut scribam.
Scribo ut cogitem.
Cogito ergo sum.