Why Write?
Writing isn't that popular anymore, and videos are dominating the information consumption norm. But why do we keep writing?
There are hundreds and millions of classic books in the world, with a thousand more of new ones coming out everyday. It is an endless stream of books and content where a normal person could not possible consume everything in sight. This is even made worse when you’re a writer.
Think of this, if there’s a random content generator AI which generates words and constantly rearranges them for an eternity. At some point, all of the possible books and written content would have been written before by the machine. This happens as it would have generate every word and rearranged every word in every possible permutation, for an eternity. At some point, everything written in the Bible, the Karma Sutra, or the Romance of the Three Kingdoms would have been exactly arranged out by a random word generator.
Hence, it is not a problem of creating something. It’s the fear of creating something which has been written before or created prior to our creative input. In this case, I would have to deduce that the highest point of pursuance in a writer’s career, is to publish something so original it distinguishes us from the other writer. No matter how much of classic books the random word generator could have written exactly, it simply wasn’t there until we have written it.
In the age of information overload, aka the modern world we’re living in, there are simply a sea of written content published everyday, and there is always a risk of your original work which has matched an idea previously imagined by someone. Plus the fact that we are all conditioned by the mass media, with each of us having too much shoving down our brain without thinking. Black and white, black and blue, communism or capitalism, rich or poor. This is all the conditional ideas which are implanted in our brain, and there simply is no escape. We once fear that the Orwellian censorship which would permeate our free speech, but it is the exact opposite that the overload of fake, misleading information that has been jeopardising the freedom of speech in which we valued so much in since the triumph of democracy.
Hence, in my opinion, we would have to de-condition ourselves first. From then on, we would start to think on our own. To feel, to think and to process it with our own brain. Forget that book, forget that movie, forget that article. Think about the experience you have faced in life. Write it. Incorporate it in your work. Transform the beauty of nature in our eyes into that beautiful text.
As ideas becoming more and more repetitive and categorised, we loss the sense of feeling. We should allow ourselves to feel the things around us, to feel the neon lights in Hong Kong, the warm breeze at a park in the afternoon, or the love of eating an apple pie.
Perhaps the world is polarised even more is that we have forgotten the roots of our existence, which is to feel, love and appreciate the everyday life. We seek for drama, conflict and polarising ideologies which set people apart from another. A nomadic tribe would leave the dead behind, the past behind, the homes behind and seek shelter and future in everything beyond today. In a cosmic scale, what humans do are simply irrelevant. Think of yourself in space, looking down on earth. And suddenly, the war of ideology becomes so so irrelevant, and that fight with your brothers and sisters are simply another tiny speck of dust on this green globe. No matter how much of the secrets of the universe we discover, humans are just a temporary existing entity in the universe, and everything we do turns to dust. Hence, it is better to appreciate life and to live everyday to its fullest.
Hence, back to the main point. Existence is to feel the beauty of our existence, and the point of becoming a better writer is to transform those wonderful moments in life into words, and hence people that came after we are long gone, could feel the beauty of our existence, that once we are here stepping on the same old ground, chasing over each other on the green grass.
Hence, by trying to record what we feel and what we do, we live on forever as a race. On top of papers and stones. And that is why we write. To live forever.