About writing
Over this weekend, I read the book Subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson. That book motivated me to jump back to writing again, so here we go.
Before I start answering the question of why I should write more, I want to talk about writing. Writing is one of the least forgiving forms of media. Let's compare it to speaking. While speaking, if you mess up something, you can rephrase it on the spot. Also if your audience happens to know more about the field than you do and start questioning you, you could change the topic to something that you know better or they know less.
So writing
- can't be edited while someone is reading
- has to have consistency
One of the characteristics of good writing is that it talks about one topic and does it well. Speaking isn't as limited. Unless it's a public talk with boundaries, you can speak as you wish and shift gears to tangential topics. So it's easier.
So writing is difficult. If you have an idea that seems good, try writing it down. You will soon start thinking, 'Wow that idea is shit. Look at how bad this writing is.' Boiling an idea into an essay is like programming out an algorithm or system design you have in mind. Anyone who has tried programming knows how difficult it is to make the code work to do exactly what you meant to. Because you really need to understand your code. The computer isn't going to execute something for you when the instructions are not clear. As powerful as they are, they are unforgiving when it comes to accuracy and syntax. There's a similarity in writing something that is not necessarily in Python or Ruby. Quite often we think about something and we feel smart. Human minds do this. It keeps tricking you that you know more than you actually do. Maybe that's the only way we keep ourselves sane. So to write something, you actually need to know it properly. And it's not fun. To some degree it's almost a masochistic cycle of realising how little you know compared to what you thought about yourself and start feeling like a piece of shit.
Another reason we don't write about everything is that we don't know that much about many things. This is because we don't have the time to understand everything from the root level. If you are cooking dumpling and realise that sunflower oil cooks it better than olive oil, you don't go do a PhD in thermodynamics. You just stop buying olive oil. To live life, we need a breadth of knowledge at a shallow level from how to cook dumplings to how to dress up to not look like a moron on your way to meet future in-laws to properly putting on a condom. And this is human nature. We would never get anything done if we decide to go into every rabbit hole of knowledge we find. This makes sense. Imagine that you have to go get a PhD in biology instead of watching a video about how to put on a condom before you get laid.
So that's why I want to write more.
- Understand things properly and not just pretend I do.
- Find out what I care about.
Let's start with the first point. I want to debunk how much of a dumb-fuck I am most of the time. I want to humble myself from starting to think I might actually know more than I think. One of the best ways to do this is to write. Even better is showing my writings to my smarter friends. I often write something, feed it to chatGPT to make it sound smarter, and get shocked by how bad it still is. My writing is so bad that even with the support of cutting edge technology, it is still bad. One of the first steps of becoming smart is properly realising how dumb you actually are. At the same time it is frightening. Every time I write something and put it on my blog, I get worried if my co-workers, mentors, or even worse future wife will read this and start thinking I'm an idiot. And when you start being scared that you are an idiot, you stop staying as one.
The second point now. We have a limited amount of time. I don't write full-time so when it comes to writing, I am really limited with time. So to write about something, I have to start sacrificing the same time I could use to gym, go out with a friend, drink a pint, or watch a movie. The fact is that I always have time to write. When I ask myself why I didn't write in a given week,I come up with all the excuses in the world. When I come up with the follow up question of how much screen time I have on the phone or how many happy hours I went to, I feel shameful. Bingo. That's it. I might not like writing as much as I want to believe we do. To write something is different from being someone who wrote something. Most of us including myself want to have wrote something. We either want to be knowledgeable without putting in the effort, or even worse, want to look knowledgeable without knowing. That's no different someone being delusional that they like gym when they just want to be in the end state of having a six pack, while spending the whole weekend eating junk food and scrolling on the phone. If you felt offended reading that, good. You and I have something in common because I feel attacked myself writing this.
I would love to have something about Korean food written. With all the K-pop, K-beauty and K-hype, it would look cool to be a software engineer who also has a passion for cooking. Maybe it even helps me in the dating scene if I have a K-recipe book under my name. But the thing is, I don't fucking care enough about cooking to go through that tough process of finding how dumb I am about cooking. I'm the least of a foodie you can find in the 2020s. I just don't have the passion to actually go read about food, study it, experiment it, to write about cooking. For other topics I could - programming, trauma, writing, etc. But definitely not about cooking. So because of the inherent challenge of writing, if I push myself to write, I only end up writing things I care about. You might be asking, who the fuck doesn't know what they care about? But hear me out. Quite often you don't know what you care about the most. That's why the compass Jack Sparrow has in the Pirates of the Caribbean is a treasure sought after. We are all delusional of what we care the most about. Because it's hard to swallow. If you think you like writing more than scrolling phones and alcohol, you would be writing something already. It sounds harsh. But it's true. Maybe you are a shallow-fuck who would rather waste time scrolling Instagram reels than take that energy to study something to a point where you feel confident enough to write. I know I am. But if the military taught me one thing that other forms of education didn't, it's to shut the fuck up and just admit what I fucked up. So I know that I simply haven't been writing enough because either I am not sure what I have passion for, or I actually don't happen to like writing as much I as I want to believe.
But if I imagine a version of myself, 5 years from now where I put my kids to sleep, give my wife a good night kiss, and crawl back to the living room to finish the last paragraph of something I have been writing, just to feel like a degenerate who actually lacks understanding in whatever I'm writing about, and finally learn that thing to finish that paragraph only to realise I'm getting three hours of sleep, it makes me smile. That sounds like a good life to me. I know I will not be sacrificing sleep for something that I don't have true passion for. So by writing more, I will better define and discover things I really do care about, and not just pretend that I do. And I will end up properly studying these things that I care about to write something that I can tolerate reading.
I really should write more this year.