I have been wishing to start writing essays for the past year now, but never got the time to write one. Writing a good essay takes a lot of time and effort ¹.

There are several reasons why I want to write and post my thoughts on this website²:

1. Writing is thinking, and I want to improve this. A lot of other essays I have read online have also mentioned that writing is clear thinking (Paul Graham mentions it here, and it is also mentioned in many other essays). Improved thinking is really important to me, since it helps both in professional life and for solving problems in personal life, and I think this can be universally agreed upon. In India, students don’t get enough practise with writing (in CBSE schools at least, maybe it is different for ICSE schools). The situation is bad enough that it took me some time to adapt to writing courses in university, although I think these are fairly hackable. Apparently, this is also an issue in the west. Therefore, I think everyone can benefit from writing down their thoughts.
2. I think this will start a lot of interesting conversations for me, as Henrik Karlsson mentions in his essay here and more succinctly Talha in his essay here. Although I am not specifically writing for random people to route interesting pieces of information to my inbox. My motivation is that most of the conversations I have with people I know are surface levelled, and I think if I post about the topics that I find interesting here, they may initiate conversations on those topics with the already provided context.
3. Somewhat similar to point 2, I think writing online will lead to me sharing content/resources that will be useful to others which I don’t end up sharing otherwise in normal conversations. For example, I have shared links to essays of three people I read in this essay only.

In the beginning, I don’t want to spend too much time on an essay, therefore the plan is to focus more on volume. Then as time passes and quality improves, I plan to let essays marinate for longer and decrease frequency but improving quality by a lot. Also, I do plan to come back to the older essays and either edit them in spot or post updates to them in the bottom.

I would also encourage you to start writing. Maybe start with writing a journal and see where it takes you.

Footnotes:

Footnotes

1. As I am writing this now, it feels like this is a lot like writing poems or composing music where I don’t have much control on when I get good ideas to write (the equivalent words in my culture can be translated as “poetic arrival”, where the words come by the grace of the God). ↩

2. Currently, the essay focuses on “I” a lot. I think they will be centred around me and my thoughts for now. This will stay there in the beginning since it makes it easy for me to write. Ultimately the goal is to use more neutral, third person voice. I am not sure if it will go there though. ↩