to write or not to write?

“A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity.” - Kafka.

insanity is an under-experienced state of mind.

in the age of AI, i have been at war with the thought of writing the products of the continuous firings of synapses in my head. having a front seat at the frontier, i could see how AI could write better and/or like humans. i asked myself then, “what is the point of writing if an AI can do it better than you?”

what is the point if an AI can write a book that sells more than yours? or a book that moves readers more than yours?

if an AI is a mathematical function that can approximate anything, it can be anything a human can be and beyond, then what is the point of being human anymore?

it is simple. if i don’t write, i will go insane.

“Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead.”

- Charles Bukowski.

to write is to be human. it is what we use to communicate after spoken language.

i held myself back from writing, as i struggled to win the dilemma in my head. each day, when the hunger to write, to let myself exist as who i am called to be, knocked upon my door, the philosophical dilemma of obsolescence by AI was the one who opened the door.

i am increasingly beginning to believe that different types of intelligences produce different “styles” of artifacts even when the “type” is similar.

why do i write? because i would throw myself off a bridge if i don’t.

there is an ecstasy, an immeasurable intoxication, to losing yourself into something and letting it kill you.

“My Dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you and let it devour your remains. For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
-Falsely yours”

- Charles Bukowski

AI can write better sentences than you. fine, that proves writing is not valuable because of sentence production. writing is forging yourself, into something symbolic, into a metaphor. it is the process of the inverse of anthropomorphization.

people think the author wants to change other’s lives, and maybe even the author thinks so, however, it is the author whose life is first changed by the process of writing.

in the future, there will be two sects of humanity - one with AI and one without.

writing, and any art, even science, therefore, any work or passion, is about yourself first and the world next. it is the old advice of “cleaning your room and then go out to fix the world” except by doing the latter first, you follow the advice counterintuitively.

when i write in my journal, it is not to produce a beautiful artifact. it is to take the continuous and make it discrete, it is to take the fuzzy and make it crisp. to put it in words, and see what is romantic, what is philosophy, what is cringe, and what is actionable.

writing is like a step-down transformer. it takes a myth, a chaos theory governed by butterfly effects, and puts it through a constrained environment, that is language, and gives me and you something that is actionable, or true, and occasionally beautiful.

when i write a song, it is to express myself through my own words. when i listen to a song, it is to express myself though another’s words. notice how at both forms of writing, i am expressing myself. that is the point.

i am not good with words. writing chose me as the medium to express itself, but i am the universe, and the universe is expressing itself through me as i am expressing myself in the universe through writing.

“No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.” - Heraclitus.

similarly as the quote, no human experience is the same. no human who writes, will write the same, and no human’s work will affect another the same.

if tomorrow a superintelligent AI makes human life meaningless, i would laugh, then i would still write, and work, and sing, and eat, and live. i would laugh because life is already meaningless and absurd. i would do the latter because i am not scared, and because i embody the indomitable human spirit.

do you not make music because someone else makes it better than you?

do you not play football because ronaldo plays better than you?

do you not cook because a michelin star chef cooks better than you?

do you not write because someone writes better than you?

persist even when the universe is meaningless, because you persist now and the universe is already meaningless.

what is more scary to a human is not death but the lack of meaning. however, meaning can only exist when you stop looking for it. meaning is like a cat, you do not go to the cat, the cat comes to you.

in the process of writing this, i have been the first reader of this artifact, and as i said, it has affected me. the process of writing this, was an attempt of reasoning, and frankly fighting a war with myself, not about whether to write essays on the internet, but the underlying meaninglessness and absurdity of everything.

today the world has no meaning. tomorrow i will forget about it. on the third day, i will be living my life. on the fourth, meaning would have found me and i would not know or care, because i am living my life.

to write or not to write? the question is not about writing, but about the indomitable human spirit versus an absurd universe and frankly, a more absurd human condition that we call life.