“While we naturally understand that writing is a good way to share ideas with others, we under-appreciate just how much good writing helps us think about an idea ourselves. Writing is not only a means of communication, it enables us to practice reasoning.
Writing forces you to slow down, focus, and think deeply. In a world where attention is fragmented into seconds, thinking becomes more reactive than reasoned. Only when [we] take time to play with our ideas can we hope to think about them substantially. Writing requires sticking with something a little longer and developing a deeper understanding.
Writing is the process by which we realize we do not understand and the process by which we come to understand.”
— Shane Parrish, Unspoken Expectations, Brain Food – No. 569 – March 24, 2024

Until I read Shane Parrish’s latest newsletter, I still had it in my mind—even after a couple of thousand blog posts—that I was writing for others. I had it partially correct. I’ve been writing for myself, to better understand that which I encounter on this dash through the decades, and then to share that processing with you; the reader. I’ve talked of breadcrumbs and the processing of ideas before myself, so the idea isn’t exactly revolutionary, but he hammered it home well enough that I thought I’d practice a bit more reasoning writing about it here.

The thing about documenting your own reasoning in a blog is that when you publish, you’ve let the world in on a bit of a secret. Deep down, you know more about who I am and how I process information about the world and my experience in it. Sure, I filter out enough that people aren’t guessing my passwords (those simple passwords are long gone anyway) or otherwise hacking my identity, but the bottom line remains clear: unless you’re writing a blog yourself, you know far more about how I think than I know about how you think. Advantage reader?

Perhaps. But we aren’t adversaries in this game of life, are we? My reasoning, should you choose to follow along, is simply my half of a conversation. And as a writer we ought to view it as such. Otherwise what is it but a dull college lecture or a dad speaking to a table full of people staring at their phones? There are some blog posts that fail to resonate with the world, and it feels a lot like that latter example in such moments of posting into the vacuum of the Internet, but that is exactly the moment to remind myself that this blog post is one human’s humble attempt to reason with the universe and to see what comes from it.

In a way, writing this blog is similar to playing chess with the computer. The computer always wins, often in frustratingly devious ways (like a cat and the mouse with me always the mouse), but each game is a lesson in strategic thinking for me, even in the loss. When the game is over, was it a waste of time or an incremental step forward towards becoming a better chess player (ie: strategic thinker)? So it is with this blog post and all those that preceded it. Each is an incremental step towards better reasoning, and better writing. And perhaps that’s enough to make me a better human too.