Why I write – in an age of automation

Writing is a by product of thinking

Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear... had I known the answers to any of these questions I would never have needed to write a novel. – Joan Didion, Why I Write, 1976

I don’t write to record a fully formed idea; I write to find the idea. Writing is a struggle for me. My initial drafts are slow, verbose, and messy – a process of talking out loud, or prototyping ideas, until I can see clearer and refine it.

Coming up through the school system, we had to prove we had done the work, and this mostly took the form of writing, regardless of the subject. In doing so, we were maybe fooled into thinking the physical essay – words in the right order on a page – was what we were being marked on.

I think the real product of writing is not the text itself, but the transformed mind.

In this way, writing is a by-product of thinking. It is the residue of my thought process. I put design in the same camp. I need to be teasing something apart to truly understand the problem. I work it out in the design. Not before, but during.

Output vs outcome

AI writing tools focus on the output, not the outcome. AI treats writing as the product. And whilst the end result may look similar, the outcome — for the writer — is vastly different.

If you let a generative AI do the writing or designing for you, you tend to bypass the thinking. I have found it a hollow feeling. The text arrives finished, polished, and somehow not mine. Not because the ideas are wrong, but because I didn’t have to fight to discover them.

I still use AI — but not to do the heavy lifting. I use it the way I use a car: to drive to the gym, not to exercise for me.

Cognitive resistance training

I write to think out loud, to process my life, to flip over every stone in my head. It’s mental calisthenics. — Paul Jun, The Defense Against Slop and Brainrot

Over the last two centuries, tools and machines replaced the manual labour that once defined human existence. That shift made our work faster and more efficient – and made our lives sedentary. To compensate for the loss of natural movement, we reengineered physical activity back into our lives with deliberate exercise. Without functional stress, our bodies atrophy.

I think the same is true for the mind. The discomfort of not quite finding the words, the frustration of circling a problem without resolution – that is where the thinking happens. That is where the gains are.

To struggle is to be human. And it is how we keep our reasoning sharp.

Written by Maarten Idema