Why Should I Write?

Why do I write? I think one of the earlier memories of me writing non-classroom was my mother telling me to start keeping a journal, so that I could write down my experience and reflect on those. I vaguely remember writing down a list of things I did, then promptly not doing that again ever. Fast forward until now, I maintain a blog at a fairly regular interval (once or twice a month) and have been telling my daughter and my students to write as much as possible. I am not talking about classroom writing or academic publications, of course. I am talking about that extra writing that jot down everything that has happened or that one has thought about. I am talking about that dreaded journal or diary that I never picked up again. Why would I want to tell others to write now? Why should they write? Why should I write?

I write to remember

I am starting, or have already forgotten, my mother’s voice. I have forgotten how she spoke and how she laughed. In twenty to thirty years, many of my memories will fade away through my own biological degradation. And this is just one example. I was writing a poem to my high school friend in the new year, and as I was doing that, I was also replaying key events that happened during those wonderful years. And I found some of them to start becoming blurry as well. I need to write now, so that they will be recorded for when I can no longer remember. There are many more events, big and small, that would seem so normal to us now, but would be spiritually invaluable many years later. As a data engineer, I will err on the side of hoarding my data: my own memories. Here is one memory of my mom from my younger year. It was during the Lunar New Year, and she wanted to make candied carrots. So she took me to the construction site nearby to get some limestones. They had a big pull of limestones that got rained on and turned into a rather
large puddle, and there were a wooden plank floating on the surface. She wanted to get the stuff from the middle of the puddle so that it looked cleaner, and she stepped on the middle of the plank to dip the cup in. I don’t remember exactly what happened, but I remembered pulling on to one of her hand as she tried to regain balance and stepped back on the ground. She told me that if it wasn’t for me, she would have fell into that puddle. I don’t know if that was true or not, but the candied carrots were awesome.

I write to feel

Feelings often accompany events. You feel the most when something happens. Nowadays, most events can be captured in digital forms, and certainly you will not have the risk of losing memories like I did. I am not gonna bother doing the what if hardware failure thing. But, what if you forgot what you feel at that moment? Or, what if the feelings were so intense and so varied that you only remember the most overwhelming thing? We are perhaps a very very long way from a medium that can capture the sound, the image, the smell, and the feeling. I still remembered the one time that I invited my crush out to bike around the city in the afternoon and then we ate ice cream. I ate two cups, and she ate one. I didn’t say anything, after that, that was it. We remained friends. Now that I remembered it, all I have in some sense of embarrassment. I should have said something instead of gobbling down ice cream. Perhaps
there were also other feelings of fun and happiness, but I have forgotten all of them. Write it down. Not immediately of course, stay in the moment and enjoy the moment. But when you have the time, write it down and record those feelings. As you are doing this, you will find new way to feel and to understand how you feel. I have yet to begin my MS in Psychology program, but I am fairly certain that this could be a good thing!

I write to matter

With AI, everyone is worried that our thoughts are going to be stolen. Being a normal (hopefully) guy that I am, I am not that worried about someone stealing my thoughts. On the other hand, perhaps with how the AI game is becoming more and more about finding human-generated contents to consume and train, it is the chance for my own thoughts to make a mark on the trillions of tokens being computed by AI to generate new thought. Maybe the headers of this essay will be generated by AI to answer the questions of a kid ten years from now regarding whether they should learn to write. As I am old and gone, this is how my marks can remain in the digital world.

There will be many other reasons to write. Write to be better at writing. Write to market yourself online better. Etc. All those reasons are the obvious ones. The three I listed above are my own reasons that I thought of. Clearly, I am not writing as often as I should or could, but I am still writing whenever I remember. Find your reasons and start writing.