Writing

The other day, I was talking to my friend about craftsmanship. I was telling him how much of a sucker I am for handcrafted items and individualized services, and how we should encourage beauty and quality in everything we do. Our conversation reminded me of Metric, one of my favorite coffee shops in Chicago. Metric has its flaws - there are no public bathrooms, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a spot to sit. And yet, I love it, because they’re dedicated to the art of handcrafted coffee. Their distinctive human-centric aesthetic coupled with the consistently impeccable quality of their coffee makes it worth taking the hike there.

Unfortunately, I was rambling about Metric to my friend in the AKPsi basement. When you’re at a frat party, drunk, trying to talk to a girl, the last thing you want is someone preaching the value of beauty to you. My friend was pretty displeased, to say the least. That’s when I realized that it was time for me to look for a different outlet for my eccentric thoughts.

I’m hyper-curious, and nothing makes me happier than interacting with and contributing to the world around me. So frankly, the fact that I don’t already have a public writing habit is surprising. Not only is writing in public a great way for me to interact with the world, it’s also an avenue for me to explore my thoughts without putting my social life in danger.

But aside from helping me clear my mind, my writing serves two purposes. On one hand, I write to understand - both myself and the world around me. My mind is always filled with tons of murky ideas. If you flung a jigsaw puzzle into a wind tunnel and took a picture of all of the tiny pieces whirling around, you’d get a pretty accurate snapshot of my brain. In order for me to formulate a coherent thought, I need to constantly grasp at thin air, hope that I catch a piece of the puzzle, collect the relevant pieces, and finally put them together. This is effectively what writing does - it lets me think. By writing my thoughts down, I can put them under the spotlight, identify flaws in them, correct them, and ship them out. As the computer scientist Leslie Lamport puts it, “If you think without writing, you only think you’re thinking”.

On the other hand, I write to be understood. Information is always entering my mind in the form of sensory stimuli - like the velvety texture of an oatmilk latte, the heavy rumbling of a diesel locomotive, the living room drowning in sunlight at dusk, or the uniquely horrendous sound of Hudson Mohawke’s “Cbat”. By writing, I hope to translate these stimuli as accurately as possible in an attempt to enable others to re-live my experiences through words.

So these essays are my attempt at achieving harmony with the world around me - by understanding it and being understood by it. I don’t know if that’s the whole point of life, but it sure feels like it.