Just Write More

I’ve felt kind of creatively stifled the past couple of months.

Not 100% stifled, but I’ve had a lower output and I’ve felt slightly less inspiration to make things.

The reasons why are unclear.

Maybe it’s because my sleep has been kind of off.

Maybe it’s higher than average stress from some work or personal things.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been distracted by a particularly weird, online political-cultural issue that’s been eating up a lot of my brain space. I’ve done too much Reddit, YouTube, and X scrolling on this oddball issue.

Who knows.

And, as I’ll argue, who cares.

An obsessive fixation on being “stifled,” and interrogating the nature of this stifling, is a great way to waste brain space. There’s a better alternative.

This is usefully illustrated with the midwit meme.

I’ve always liked the midwit meme—technically, a meme template, since it has a thousand variations. The meme is always a riff on one idea.

A sub-literate moron (on the left of the curve) and a brainiac Jedi (on the right of the curve) espouse an identical, dead simple belief about some issue.

The midwit—the guy of middling intelligence, in the middle, who fancies himself a superior intellectual—blathers on about the nuances and complexities of the issue.

Like many memes, it probably originated in some dark corner of 4chan before spreading out to other nooks and crannies of internet culture and eventually propagating to the normie internets.

But what I like about the meme is that it carves out a real truth: When we understand something deeply, we tend to simplify it.