I can hear the echo of writing advice, and people asking for it, still in the back of my mind. “How do I write well?” they ask, “what should I write about?” But they never ask themselves: “should I write?” And the truth is that no one should be writing anything anymore. Writing is, simply put, a disgraceful technology that will bring the downfall of humanity.
In this article, I will try to persuade you to put your keyboard in the trash, because it’s useless now.
You have an idea. It’s great, so you think you’ll write a great story. But you haven’t written anything. Ask yourself: will your writing be good? No, most likely, it won’t. So you write down your great idea, but you’re inexperienced and can’t develop it properly.
This is an issue faced by all writers. If you could see everything that a famous artist has done in their life, you will find a trail of poorly executed ideas, ugly drawings, bad first drafts. You imagine a great world, and the greatest thing you can do for it is to give it a broken house in your inexperienced writing?
As you write more, you will notice that your ideas are getting better! But, where are your first ideas? Lying in a drawer with your first drafts, all broken, dusty, fading with time. What will you tell them? That you found better ideas, so it was worth it to disrespect them like that?
As a good person, you should give your first ideas the consideration that they deserve, and not ruin them by writing them. The same goes for all the ideas you have after the first. Do they not deserve the same respect? In fact, you shouldn’t write any ideas that you have, or those of any other people.
If a tree falls in a forest and there’s no one to hear its sound, did it really make a sound? Similarly, flaws are human creations; they arise from analysis. Something cannot be faulty if it’s not analyzed against an artificial paradigm.
Once you start writing, your writing will be read, inevitably, either by yourself or others. If you publish your writing, it will get many reviews. Most will be positive, yes, but there will be negative ones as well! Your ideas, your talent, your actions, once judged only by your optimistic mind, will at once lose their innocence and become faulty.
Even one negative review is too much: your writing is now flawed. If you respect yourself and want to remain perfect, flawless, you should not submit yourself and your ideas to the hellish landscape of human observation, where analytical minds will compare them to a critical standard.
Your ideas and talent are better unused, as doing anything will showcase (i.e., create) failings that weren’t there before (in the abstract world that exists in your conscience). By writing, you soil your perfection.
Consider this: what is the purpose of writing? To be read, of course, to create an effect. However, given how much writing there is already in the world, how likely is it that your writing will be read? There is a high likelihood that some of your works will remain unread, especially the first ones, so their purpose will not be met.
Even if you enjoyed writing all your ideas, you’ve gone and done something inefficient: you could have lived your life purposefully and done things that actually achieve their purpose all the time, but you decided to go into writing, and now there is a high chance that your writing will never be read.
This means that, instead of being purposeful 100% of the time, you now leave your time-efficiency in the hands of fortune. Will your writing be read or not? Will it achieve its purpose or not? It’s not 100% probability now, that’s for sure, so you’re better off doing things with 100% probability of achieving their purpose and putting your time into good use.
Did you know that for more than a million years, humanity did not have access to the technology of writing? Writing, on the other hand, is only around 6500 years old. Humans did not only survive but thrived as a species for more than a million years without writing a single word.
Our true tradition is much older than these pesky millenia. In fact, even though writing was invented many thousands of years ago, until a couple of hundred years ago, most people couldn’t read or write! Now, although we pretend that writing can be a good thing, we’re straying away from our traditional means of storing and transmitting information: oral language.
In fact, while humans are about 2 million years old, our common ancestry stems from more than 60 million years ago, from the first evolved Simians. Arguably, we should instead try our hardest to go back to our path. We should be returning to monke.
