You need to start writing personal essays

I am begging you to start writing more essays, or to just start writing essays, if you haven't already.

And no, I'm not talking about the essays that you were told to write in school.

I am talking about one of the greatest tools to learn faster.

Think deeper.

Improve the articulation of your ideas and beliefs and avoid being replaced by AI.

Yes, I'm serious, but those specifically are the selfish personal benefits of writing.

That's what you and I get from the act of putting words on paper.

But there is something a lot deeper.

The modern information environment is breaking our ability to think.

And most people don't even notice.

And even more don't even care.

Essays might be one of the last forms of content that actually develops your capacity to make sense of reality, because right now we are living through the Large-Scale production of Fake Thinking in history, and the consequences of this are quite high, as you'll find out in this video, and only a select few of you will actually care enough to take advantage of it and profit from it.

So in this video, I want to show you how this fake thinking epidemic, as we'll call it.

And if it goes on as it is right now, which is in a bad downward direction, will not only make your own life worse, but will potentially lead to the collapse of civilization.

And then at the end, I want to help you write your first essay so that you can fix one of the most precious resources that you have, which is your mind.

And of course, turning it into a career or a side income doesn't hurt either.

So the first point here is that the internet isn't dead, but it's killing us.

And we'll start with a quote from Daniel Stockton.

Berger actually, every quote in this video is going to be from Daniel Stockton Berger.

The written word as the primary type of media was probably required for democracy to work because it required the capacity to pay attention to an idea for long enough to understand it.

Now, the point of this section is that social media and I are quite literally a threat to civilization, and I know you don't see it as that, because all you see it as is this little app on your phone that you use every day.

And I know it sounds insane, like how could doom scrolling Instagram Reels eventually lead to the collapse of society?

How could watching a little person dance on TikTok hurt?

How could reading someone's five second 280 character opinion polarizing opinion on Trump on Twitter ruin the world?

That's just something that you do on your lunch break.

The reason is because you only focus on yourself.

You only think about your own little bubble of life, and you don't think about the impact or the consequences of the little unconscious actions that you've picked up over time.

And so when you zoom out beyond yourself to see what's really at play, it's hard to unsee.

Now there are three layers to this.

So stick with me because we're going to go deep, and I promise that it will change the way that you think about not only writing and essays, but just long form content in general and social media and how actually impactful those things can be.

So the first layer is that the epistemic commons is being poisoned.

So your question then is what is the epistemic comments?

And you can think of it as the water supply.

But for information. So that's social media. That's the news.

That's wherever you get information from a public resource.

So as an example, most people watch the news to stay informed or to educate themselves.

But if you look closely you can just see that they're getting complacent.

They're not thinking at all.

Their lives aren't changing for the better.

In fact, more people are just becoming more jaded, more polarized, and more violent.

Whenever you post on social media or whenever someone creates a TV show or movie, or whenever someone produces music on Spotify, the epistemic comments or public information environment grows.

Now, this obviously gets very complex and it requires a certain level of systems thinking to completely understand.

But if the content you publish in public hurts more than it helps, and is not counterbalanced by content that does help, our intellectual water source becomes contaminated.

So why is that bad?

Because the information that you or any individual consumes influences your identity, right?

If you've watched any of my other videos on identity, or the self or personality or the psychology behind it all, you understand that your identity is created through this feedback loop of information that leads to conditioning, or information that leads to action, and once repeated, leads to conditioning, and that becomes who you are.

So your identity, which is shaped by the information that you consume, influences your behavior and thus your trajectory in life.

It determines the outcome of your life.

You think something as simple as reading a little social media post doesn't determine where you end up in life.

You are wrong.

Now, beyond that, the form of information that you consume.

So a short form tweet or long form books or articles or podcasts that trains your attention span.

It also trains your tolerance for complexity and ability to hold contradictions in the capacity for nuance.

And I mean, that's why you learn in the first place, right?

That's why you intentionally consume information.

It's to equip yourself with the knowledge and cognitive capacity and ability to get what you want in life.

But that's just it.

Before you can solve any problem that is a civilizational threat in climate governance, AI alignment, public health, or the rest, you need a population capable of understanding the problem coherently.

99% of people don't even know what these problems entail because they're happy drooling over the cat video on their phone.

So the takeaway that we'll touch on later and throughout this video is this does what you consume or create lead to a beneficial behavior change in yourself and others, or are you unconsciously soaking in information that silently makes your life worse and poisons the information environment by what you contribute to it?

So that's just layer one.

Now, as a very quick reminder, the build a two hour content system in 14 days.

I know that's a heck of a name for a cohort slash challenge that starts very soon.

I put out this video a bit too late, so you're on the timer link in the description if you want to join that.

So if you are interested in turning intentional, thoughtful writing into some form of a career or side income, or simply realize that you do have ideas worth putting out into the public, consider joining before the start date.

Now that leads to point number two, which are the three forces breaking civilization's ability to think?

Another quote from Daniel Berger as technology is empowering our choices and we are getting something like the power of gods.

You have to have something like the love and the wisdom of gods to wield that, or you self-destruct.

So with that quote, I want to finally introduce you to who I think is one of the greatest thinkers of our time, Daniel Berger.

He doesn't post much on social media.

I think he hasn't posted in years, actually, but he does make the occasional appearance on a podcast.

If you just search for him on YouTube.

But when you listen to them, you can instantly tell that he has a very deep and profound thinker that is calm, nuanced and non polarizing.

And he has dedicated his life to what he calls the meta crisis.

And while it's much deeper than what we're talking about in this video of just posting content on social media or writing essays, that's what we're personally focused on here, because that's what I want to talk about today.

So in a nutshell, Daniel Neuberger believes that there are three converging forces that can result in three different outcomes, two of those outcomes being catastrophic in the three forces that are converging or threats to civilization in society.

So the three threats or what he calls generator functions, or first rivalrous dynamics, which are win lose games where one party's gain requires another's loss.

So think arms races or corporate competition, or social media content and academic publishing like hoarding data to publish first.

The second is substrate consumption.

Substrate is what something needs to exist, like soil for plants, attention for media, or trust for markets.

When systems consume their foundation faster than they can regenerate, that's bad.

So you can think depleting topsoil that took millennia to form and the attention economy consuming human cognitive capacity faster than it recovers.

And the third threat is exponential technology.

So tools and systems that improve themselves at accelerating rates, outpacing human wisdom.

You can think AI doubling in capacity, automated weapons and social media algorithms evolving faster than we can study their psychological impacts.

So when those three things converge, they can result in civilizational collapse.

So nuclear war, unaligned AI, ecological destruction or engineered pandemics, or outside of civilizational collapse, they can result in dystopian control.

So think total surveillance just being surveilled all the time or digital authoritarianism, or just the elimination of agency in the ability to make your own choices.

So he calls these two outcomes attractors.

Those are the two attractors that we're trying to avoid heading towards.

And they are kind of like the basins that a lot of complex societies already fall into.

If you look around the world now, the third attractor or the good outcome, here is a world where sense making, shared understanding and aligned incentives exist.

Now, when we look at the internet, AI and social media, it's pretty easy to see this playing out.

As an example, content creators compete for attention so they optimize for engagement rather than transformation, which is the rivalrous dynamics part.

Because the algorithm doesn't measure transformation, it measures how much someone viewed the thing or liked the thing or shared the thing.

So creators are much more likely to abandon truth or transformation for whatever will make people react.

That's an obvious problem.

So when engagement is optimized in someone consumes that information.

Like you watching this video, it does not require thinking or understanding.

So the viewer's mental muscle thinking muscle atrophies.

AI accelerates content production, yes, but it also accelerates imitation.

And when there is only destructive content to imitate, you can see where that goes.

So AI itself isn't the issue.

The issue is that it can mimic what looks like real thinking without requiring any cognitive effort from either the creator or the consumer.

So the default outcome here is that the epistemic commons, or mental water supply becomes poisoned incredibly fast, because it's optimized for content that looks like it should shift your thinking, but structurally it cannot.

So that's layer two, which leads to layer three, which is what you can actually do about it and how you can profit from it in a meaningful way.

So point number three is why essays may be the last bastion of real thinking.

In another quote, wisdom is not algorithmic and cannot be made algorithmic.

Now for the past few decades, a certain type of content has dominated the internet, specifically content that delivers conclusions without requiring thought.

In other words, it's fast food for the mind.

So we're going to call this category of media or information fast content, because social media companies use the same psychological triggers to get you addicted as fast food companies who realized fat, sugar and salt were a scarce good, that our brains aren't wired to have an abundance, finding those resources spike dopamine because they eat it in survival.

So, on the fast content end of the spectrum, you have BuzzFeed listicles, rage tweets, AI generated summaries, hot takes, engagement optimized threads, and TikTok explainers.

They give you the feeling of understanding in 30s.

It makes sense why everyone thinks they're an expert these days.

Now, on the slow content end of the spectrum, or content that requires you to think and potentially change your behavior, you have essays, long form non optimized conversations, certain books, certain lectures, and even tweets crafted in a way that make you think to receive the insight.

Now, I personally want to focus on essays, but all of this type of content is good and that's actually what we go over in the challenge that I mentioned link in the description.

So why essays?

Because they are something that you can produce alone and leverage to take advantage of the meaning economy we're heading into.

And essays are the most scalable and durable form.

A meaningful conversation can shift one person, but it lives and dies in the memory of the participants.

An essay develops the readers and writers thinking capacity, and it can do that for thousands of people across thousands of years.

More on that in a bit.

And on top of that, most people, including me, including you, walk around with opinions that they've never thought through.

They feel like they believe something, but they've never sat down and tried to write out exactly what they believe in.

The especially haven't tried to write it down in a way that would survive a smart person's criticism.

And it also doesn't hurt that some of the world's most respected minds were forged through the act of writing essays.

So Paul Graham for the tech pros, or Isaac Newton for the science prose, or Jordan Peterson in his prime, or Nietzsche or Emerson, or a lot of people.

The defining factor of an essay is that I cannot write one now for understanding what an essay actually is.

It helps to distinguish an essay from an article, articles or answers, while essays or arguments articles package existing knowledge, while essays change the author's beliefs, articles start with the conclusion, while essays figure it out.

Articles inform or educate.

While essays are an act of thinking, articles communicate what's already there, while essays discover what isn't.

Now, this video isn't to say that you should never write an article, and it's also not to say that essays and articles don't overlap in some way.

What I'm trying to say is that you should write with the intention of refining what you believe in, actually impacting the other person on the other side.

Now, if you think about it, only a human can write an essay because a robot doesn't have a situated point of view, it does not have direct experience.

It can simulate the perspective you tell it to adopt, but it lacks the beliefs, biases, and emotions that lead you to think and question in a particular direction.

And honestly, I use AI a lot.

It would be nearly impossible to pass off all of that context.

It would need to be hooked into your brain like Neuralink at all times, in order to understand every passing moment, every experience.

How you get information.

It would have to understand all of your memories, all of your unconscious, everything that leads to you being who you are today.

That's why I've been saying for the longest time that you are the niche.

You are the most valuable resource, your point of view.

I've talked about that in multiple videos, so I doesn't have access to that, because every passing moment influences your point of view.

And in order to have a meaningful point of view worth writing about or we're talking about, you can't be sitting at your desk all day on Claud 24 over seven.

You have to engage in novel experiences. You have to live life.

You can't live.

The optimized, efficient productivity life of just staring at your laptop all day.

So while everyone is just locked in to the agents, the new agents, the open floor, getting them to just build a bunch of nonsense that is going to get them nowhere, you have to actually reject that.

Go out, experience life, build a good life, and then bring that online because nobody else is doing that.

That's how you become unique.

And now I think the more important point here is that I've recently realized that I destroys the magic of surprise and discovery.

In other words, it destroys creativity.

Sure, I can be creative in some ways, but this is a crucial point.

You can tell AI to share something novel, but then you are anticipating it.

It is no longer novel.

It's no longer surprise you destroyed any chance of stumbling upon a discovery.

In other words, you destroyed any chance of actually discovering it.

It may give you good material to write about, but it was not from your own creative ability and thinking.

So the more I use AI, the more useful I find it, because it's incredibly useful.

But on the other edge of the sword, I find that it exhausts creativity extremely fast because creativity is kind of sparse.

Again, it requires you to go out, do things, experience something novel, and then you have a little bit to write about.

But with AI you can just give it to the AI and then it does everything for you.

And now, like you are empty creatively, you didn't take the time to actually sit with it, understand it, think through it.

So as someone who is still very pro AI, I can't help but believe that the most relevant content on the internet going forward will be in essay form, solo content.

And I don't only mean long form, I mean anything that is the opposite of what an article is like.

We went over.

So that leads to point number four, which is about the meaning economy and how to thrive in it.

So we talked about this in a future video that was called The Future of Work and the New high income skill stack, and it got a decent amount of views, but I still think it's vastly underrated and more people should go watch it.

It's like five videos ago that I posted, but in that video I talk about the meaning economy.

And this meaning economy, so to say, has been emerging for a few years now, and AI has only accelerated this and made this more of a thing.

I would argue that I'm a part of the meaning economy and many value creators, which we'll touch on in a bit, form this meaning economy, or at least the starts of it.

So why is this important?

Because meaning is the scarcest commodity in civilization right now.

Before industrialization, we praised gods in the sky.

During industrialization, we made productivity. Are God.

Today more is our God.

More money, more information, more content.

We have more stuff and less purpose than ever.

So in my eyes, meaning will be sold at a premium.

People will crave it more than they already do because most people in today's world feel lonely, feel empty, feel like they don't have any purpose, feel like they're not working towards anything greater than themselves.

They're just stuck on their computer all day, hoping that pulling the eye slot machine or doing the repetitive tasks that they were assigned leads to something good.

And so who better to provide that meaning than those who shape the epistemic commons or the mental water supply, or the information environment?

It's the value creators who fight against the poisoning of the water supply.

Now the question is how is meaning created or experienced?

Because we need to understand that before we can actually replicate it.

I guess when attention is fragmented, scattered, and pulled in competing directions, that's psychic entropy.

It feels like anxiety, boredom, and restlessness.

It's chaos when attention is invested in a complex, challenging activity with clear feedback that psychic neg entropy.

It feels like flow, purpose and meaning.

It's order.

So meaning isn't something you find out there in the world.

It's a state of consciousness that emerges when your attention is ordered towards something complex enough to fully engage you.

If you are level ten, a level one challenge is boring, and a level 20 challenge is daunting.

But a level 11 challenge is just enough to lock you in.

So in other words, meaning is the experience of ordered consciousness.

Now, along the same vein, meaning is created through the process of ordering consciousness, the act of ordering consciousness or taking chaos and creating structure or wrestling with complexity until it coheres results in meaning.

Obviously, if the experience of ordered consciousness is meaningful.

So if you've ever been stuck in a rut or wrestled with where your life should go and eventually receive this like burst of clarity that launches you into this intense season of life, you've directly experience this.

So what does this have to do with content, essays, writing, etc.?

One is that fast content or entropic pre digested algorithmic AI generated content skips the ordering process and delivers prepackaged conclusions.

The reader's consciousness stays and becomes more disordered.

They received information but didn't generate meaning.

That's why they feel informed.

But empty too.

Is that slow content.

So essays genuine thinking in public or insight that requires effort requires both the writer and the reader to engage in the ordering process.

The writer orders their own consciousness through the act of writing.

The reader reorders their thoughts by properly digesting the thinking.

So what's the opportunity here?

The main thing is that the world doesn't need more rage bait posters and mainstream news channels.

It also doesn't need more people competing to become the most productive person in the world, and trying to build the next billion dollar AI company.

Instead, it needs ordinary people who make sense of their own minds and document them in public.

Now, previously, I've called these types of people value creators.

I quite literally have a video called The Value Creator or The rise of the Value Creator, and now I call them value creators because they're very distinct from your typical influencer or personal brand.

It's a person who chooses a positive trajectory for their life, cares deeply about the interests and skills that help move the needle toward that, and passes their journey down from their point of view to others who can relate and benefit from it.

By all measures, I believe this is a futureproof and deeply meaningful way to live.

Sure, you weren't creating a tangible physical product to show that you've actually done something, or that you have a real job, but you are causing a greater cascade.

That is, you are providing the route.

You're providing the information that influences identity, that influences behavior, that influences the flourishing or destruction of civilization.

And in my eyes, even building rockets isn't that impactful.

That's honestly why I do what I do.

Or maybe not why I chose to do this.

I kind of stumbled upon it, but I found that this was just a deeply meaningful way to live.

It's very purposeful. It feels good.

So that leads to point number five, which is how to think in public and why it's the most valuable skill you can develop.

Now, it's kind of funny here because with this video it's just a polished package, right.

There's cuts that cut out everything but the outline of this video or the newsletter.

Subscribe to my Substack if you want these before they go out on YouTube.

This was incredibly difficult to write and just think through.

I actually had three other drafts of Why You Should Write Essays that I scrapped entirely, because they just didn't feel right.

But by sticking with the challenge and really trying to synthesize a point of view that I actually aligned with and that I felt was true and impactful has changed my mind.

It's helped me articulate and cohere or make something coherent in my mind.

And if this video changes your mind or your behavior in some way, that brings even more meaning into my life and yours.

And now I hope you can experience that same feeling.

So we need to get a bit practical here.

I want you to try writing your first essay of some form, even if it's difficult.

It's supposed to be difficult, especially if you're not a writer.

So I put a few points together.

These are going to be rapid fire, so it's not too long.

But this should get you started, right?

You don't need that much to just start with.

Take out a piece of paper and start writing, or to open up an app and start writing.

So here's how you write an essay.

First is write to discover, not to perform.

Because most social media engagement comes from packaging anyway, and you can learn about that later.

So start with a concept, viewpoint, question, experience, thought, or something that bothers you or just a topic.

An essay begins with uncertainty and an open mind.

Two is right about what genuinely interests you.

Focus on a single main idea.

Use this as a time to research and learn.

Go down rabbit holes. Challenge everyone's point of view.

Do not accept one source as law three.

Resist the template.

You'll find how you like to structure your writing as you get better at it.

It's a skill.

Remember that. But for now, just write.

Have a debate with yourself.

Ask questions to keep the writing going.

Then worry about the structure and ask for help if you want.

Do the thinking first for ask.

Do I actually believe this?

It's easy to write what you already believe, but the point of this is to change what you believe.

This is the most difficult part.

Resist the urge to act like you are absolutely right.

Five read essays and consume central content.

Your sense making capacity is shaped by your inputs.

You can't expect the for you page to feed you this content.

You must actively search, curate and nurture your digital feed.

Six build a body of work, not a content calendar.

People don't follow creators for one piece of content they follow for their body of coherent work.

Each essay compounds on the last.

I can't replicate a coherent philosophy built through years of genuine thinking, so that makes sense.

But where do you start?

If you actually want to do this online, I would recommend ECS or Substack because that's where you're really seeing the revival of long form content.

I mean, I was runner up in the $1 million challenge of the articles when they brought articles back in mind, went insanely viral.

Substack, I think, is the most slept on social media right now because one, you own your audience, people who follow or subscribe to you, you have a list of them too.

It's email first, and if you understand anything about newsletters or email marketing, you understand how powerful that is.

And three, they have a notes feed of people who actually appreciate deep and genuine thinking.

So if you need somewhere to write, I just start with Substack or X, depending on which one you vibe with the most.

Now, I've written about that in my newsletter, and I've talked about it in multiple videos before, so we're going to leave it at that.

I think that's enough.

And again, if you want a guided challenge to do this and you want to understand frameworks for writing and how to generate or capture ideas, or how to just figure out what you want to talk about or how to phrase things in an impactful way.

Then consider joining the build a two hour content system in 14 days challenge that starts very, very soon because I got this video out late.

Link in the description for that.

If you don't join that, at least like and subscribe if you like this video and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.