why write?
date: May 11 2026
this is an answer to myself, because, as you will find out, I don’t really care about you (as a reader)
thinking
I imagine there’re lots of reasons different people might be writing on the internet, but I have specific goals and ideas in mind. the most important reason is that it forces me to structure my thoughts. I’ve spent enough time in my head to know that those fuzzy blobs of ideas and concepts floating around my head are not the only way to “think”. a lot of the time something makes perfect sense in my head but becomes completely the opposite once I put it into structured sentences. I feel like there is a lot of power to how quickly I can make connections in my head, or essentially “skip” thinking steps in my mind, connecting seemingly disconnected concepts/ideas together through some kind of fuzzy path. but that fuzzy thinking has its own drawbacks.
I wonder how much the AI research around LLMs I've been reading affects how I think I think, because I've never properly read any actual research around the brain and thoughts, at least nowhere close to the same volume. but I assume that it does not significantly impact the usefulness of conclusions I derive from my understanding of my thoughts (which is a big ask, but oh well)
on a high level, I feel like there’re 10x differences in “structure” and “consistency” of thought between thinking vs speaking vs writing. as I go from one to another, it takes a lot more effort, but also condenses and structures the thoughts in a very useful way.
in many scenarios I’ve found my thoughts go in circles, losing structure. I would be thinking for an hour without having a good explicit understanding of where the thoughts are going and why, and if you asked me what I was thinking about, I can’t always give a clear answer of what thoughts happened in the last 5min vs the 20min before that. I imagine there is a lot to be said about rigour and discipline in controlling my own thoughts and that process, but one tool I have to work around that is language. I would start recording an audio/video journal and talk out loud. that makes for a huge difference in how structured my thinking is and the intentionality of the direction of my thoughts. it also often leads to a lot more conclusions reached/decisions made compared to just thinking; sometimes things just sound a lot more obvious when put into words.
but, even with that taken into account, if I go back and listen to those recordings or transcribe and try to read my yapping, it feels extremely sparse in actual intelligent thought. there is a lot of fluff, a lot of normal “speech” that I do not care about when I consume that stream of information. that is where writing comes in: I can communicate the same ideas in orders of magnitude fewer words (in theory). the process of condensing my thoughts/speech into sentences and paragraphs forces me to “process” those thoughts a lot more, and be a lot more intelligent and intentional about how I communicate my ideas. arbitrarily speaking, there is 10x more brainpower used behind every word I speak vs a fuzzy thing I think, and 10x more behind every word I write compared to a word I speak.
all of this is quite unscientific, and is further limited by my communication abilities. now that I've written all this, I realize there're a lot of edge cases or scenarios I can think of to refute my thought process above, but roughly speaking, I think the ideas are in the correct direction.
intentionality
even before the LLMs and all the fluff and brainrot on the internet, there was an insane amount of content and information for us to consume. personally, out of all the hours of content I’ve consumed in my life, only a tiny percentage was extremely intentional, and unfortunately a lot of my hours were spent on passive consumption. by itself, fundamentally I do not think it is a bad thing - my mind is a hoarder’s attic of random content from veritasium, diy people, rando 5k subscriber math explainer videos waiting to be used and connected to a bigger picture of understanding when I open up that quantum cryptography paper or something along those lines. it’s almost like a lot of this passively consumed content adds uncompressed fluff into my brain that is condensed and solidified into actual knowledge and concepts the next time I do a more intentional learning (in addition to being entertaining and relaxing, etc.)
idk if it actually works like that, but I think so, maybe, it's a neat idea, I like it
the issue is how much I do of passive consuming vs intentional consumption vs producing. consuming passively is easy; depending on what you’re consuming, it might even feel productive. but at the end of the day, if you ask me what I consumed that day, I might remember 10-15% of all of it. even if I go back and look at every single thing, will I remember the content? what new information was actually left in my mind? so the goal is to shift that distribution towards more intentional consumption and production of artifacts. producing artifacts from something I consumed requires me to be intentional about it; it cannot be passive. and if what I produce is in my own writing, it forces me to structure a lot of the information I just consumed.
producing
another aspect is that there is something fundamentally different about producing vs consuming. producing in general is a lot more fulfilling and meaningful. it is a hard skill by itself - creating something new, from scratch. I am pretty bad at it, and I want to get better. fundamentally, in life, I do not want to just consume information and observe the world; I want to play in the playground. I want to be an active participant in it. and that fundamentally requires me to take actions, and to produce. writing is just one form of such production.
quality of writing and thought
in general, as you can tell from this article, I am pretty bad at writing. I never really liked English classes in school, and I stopped practicing writing and reading almost entirely the moment I was no longer required to by an external force. but, as it turns out, this is actually quite an important part of life, and I want to become better at all this. I don’t really have a goal of becoming a great writer or anything like that, but there is definitely an 80/20 heuristic to be applied here. I imagine I will get a lot of benefits by going from 0 to something.
also, this is one of the ways for me to practice my communication skills. communicating technical ideas in eng meetings, selling product in demos, convincing people to join my startup, resolving conflicts - all of these should benefit from improving my ability to communicate.
external readers
yep, that’s you. as I mentioned, I don’t really care about readers. I do not have a goal of becoming a great blogger, or a technical writer, or a social media influencer - I do not want that. I think writing for an audience and optimizing your “success” as a writer is a very different beast compared to what I outlined above. I do not really care about how many people read this, or how engaged they are, or if I can start selling ads, etc. in some sense, all of this writing is for me by me. sorry.
but there is a very real effect that publishing on the internet has on what and how I write. I do not know if anyone will ever read this, especially someone I would meet even once in real life, but the possibility of that already forces me to keep some imaginary quality bar in my mind. it forces me to write better than I would’ve written if these notes stayed private in my vault. it forces me to think through potential consequences of my writing. and it forces me to not be completely stupid and detached. and all of these are good incentives, I would say. so, I am writing this online.