#20/120 - Why write essay

Hi, I am summerbud,

Some of the wisdom can be transferred with very simple structure, and the simplicity makes it powerful.

For example I recently came across a short on Instagram, talking about not every creation needing to be monetized. The speaker is an old man with gray hair, he used words carefully and spoke slowly, you can feel the tension in the air, built by his voice, softly saying: You don’t need to monetize those things you already feel grateful, interested and passionate about, they can just be your craft, and that is already valuable.

That is a powerful message, thus I shared it with one of my friends, he could resonate with it too. As a natural next step, I began to think, this is a nice message to my audience, what if I could write it down as an essay?

But when I further developed this idea, a thought came in “Why not just send this short to my audience?” If that short is already powerful, why translate it into an essay which is harder and more demanding for my audience.

These two voices were debating in my mind for quite a while. I value simplicity, that short already handles the message quite well, adding an essay on top of it might not yield us more progress.

Although I seldom do this kind of swing, I began to push my thought to the edge of the spectrum, “If done right, a wisdom can be transferred through shorts, why write long form essays?”

Is it just because our writer’s own ignorance and arrogance, thinking this kind of long format is better than those simplified, short, messages? If we can write these messages like a poet, condense them until they can’t be stretched further. Isn’t that a much better medium for our audience? For whoever uses their precious time to attend our thought process.

And on the technique side, putting that kind of short but beautiful messages together is not easier than writing an essay. Sometimes, even harder.

Then, why do I write these essays then.

If I answer this question by denying the wisdom a lighter medium can hold, I am intellectually lying. And I also can’t say because I love writing these essays, it naturally gives me fulfillment no matter I have audience or not, that is true, but indirectly escapes from the question. Since I am the writer, by nature it’s hard for me to directly answer this question, we need to twist the form a bit. See the shape in another perspective.

Why do we need to read essays?

It’s not because of the wisdom those essays provide, it’s not because of the knowledge they introduce, it’s not because of the stories they tell.

It’s because you are forcing yourself to think with the author.

That is the reason.

Imagine a spectrum. From passive receiver to active receiver. They are all receivers, not into the producer part. And in my mind there are different ways to receive knowledge

Sliding shorts -> Watching Videos -> Reading Essays -> Reading Books -> Writing Notes -> Producing Your Thoughts.

Sliding shorts doesn’t demand you the same energy compared to other activities, you don’t need to follow through the words since those producers are all very good at condensing the lines into very easy to grasp ideas. Then there is watching a video, if that topic is much advanced you need to use your mental energy. But it should be easier than reading since you basically use two sensations at the same time to help you understand it

• You see the pictures, together with the words.

• You hear the talking voices.

It’s easier than purely reading something since your imagination wheel didn’t need to work that hard to compose the map for you to navigate, and since humans are very delicate visual animals, our visual memory is better than anything else, you can easily remember what the video just showed you previously, but it’s much harder to remember what the article just said.

Reading essays is another level of energy consumption, then there is reading books, it demands more training to read, read in an accurate way. Read in a bi-channel way. These all demand lots of energy.

The next step is writing down your thoughts after consuming all this information. For example, when I saw that short, I sent it to my friend, at the same time wrote something in my notebook, the next day writing session I began to write something down around this topic. This step is not limited to all the media you consumed, it can be any thought you collect on the way of being in the world. It demands more energy since you are actively using different parts of your brain, and it’s very close to creating something.

With this spectrum we can then ask the follow up question: If reading essays costs more energy, why should we do that, if we can get the information at a low energy consumption rate.

Our brain is an incredibly lazy organ, and it consumes a big chunk of energy circulating in the body, and is very picky when it comes to energy source. And like any muscle, if you use it a lot, it will get stronger every time you demand it to work in a specific way, if you don’t, it will be weaker day after day.

Reading is one of the ways to demand your brain to exercise itself.

Think about sliding shorts as sitting on a chair, watching video as walking, sometimes fast sometimes slow, and reading as resistance training.

Every word you read makes your brain stronger, the reason is simple, when you get into the reading world, you will find out by yourself or be told by someone else, reading is not just receiving the words in the medium, you are thinking with the words at the same time, it’s a calibrating process, you use reading as a training process to help you think clearer. I would like to use what Walter Benjamin said as a highlight, right when photography was invented, when we were seeing the evolution of motion pictures, Benjamin asked a very important question, how it would affect the way people process information. And there is one thing pretty clear, that is “disruption is inevitable”, the motion pictures attract people by shock, but reading attracts people by contemplating.

Distraction is the mode of reception of art in the era of its technological reproducibility.

The next question, on the direction of resistance training our brain, if reading books is already enough, why do we need to read essays in this regard?

Yes, that is true, if you are willing to do that, I will highly suggest that you should read books. But at the same time, I can think of three benefits of reading essays.

1. The balance: Online essays strike a perfect balance between reading books and daily work. It’s not as demanding as reading books, and it’s not as passive as sliding through shorts.

2. The speed: Essays are lighter than books, they react to what is happening in the world faster, so if you want to read what is other’s reaction toward a specific topic, an essay can help you get what you want faster.

3. Low sunk cost: The sunk cost of reading an essay is very small, if you’re stuck on a long essay which drains your energy without giving you much benefit, you can just dump it.

And I will argue in the era of AI, how fast and accurately you can read an essay and process the information can determine your quality of output using the AI. Since serious usage of AI now all involves designing the structure, reading the documents generated by AI, and they are all in the form of essays.

Now to the final point “Creation”, get back to the perspective of writer and ask the question: Why write essays?

The true but intellectually escaped answer is “If my audience find reading my essays helpful toward their mind, I will keep writing for them.” It’s not the intrinsic value of one’s behavior, in my mind the value of writing essays should not be derived from how they’re consumed.

For me, writing essays is a way to let the thought sink in, it’s different from writing a personal journal or memo. Here, you need to clarify one thing to its clearest state, and then consolidate your thought for your reader to answer why they should also value this topic. It’s a very hard, time-consuming task, and by doing so, I am polishing my pen, my mind, my willpower, my thought quality.

So think about it like a three-layered process tube for water, when the water comes in, you want to filter out basic impurities by taking notes, it will first cut out half of the information and only retain the most important part. Then you let the water go through a Reverse Osmosis process by writing essays. The random thought is purified, cleansed, recalibrated, and you are proving the thought worth your audience’s time by first devoting your time into it (Skin in the game), and then you might distill that clarified thought into something harder, like a book or other medium. That is the final step.

Essays strike an ideal balance between the work/life pace we have as a reader, and writing essays also serves as an intermediate step for a writer to advance their thought into a more condensed state. So the intrinsic value of writing essays, for me, is to help me develop a much bigger, much more complex format.

It trains me to develop thoughts under limitation, carefully pick how to describe them, balance the rational and emotional. And it provides me a fulfillment no other activity can provide.

And if we circle back to what was said by the old man with white hair in that short, this doesn’t need to be monetized, it already shines on its own, when you create, and when you are fulfilled on the journey, that already paid itself. What comes outside is just the bonus. Cherries on the top.

Here is the short.

Thanks Lucy for reading the draft of this essay.