I read this thing...

Published July 8, 2025

We need to write because eventually we need to communicate with other people. I won’t try to sell the value of communicating with others here. If you find yourself questioning that, heck I’ve been there. Don’t give in!

But imagine you get into a conversation with another person, or group of people, and they say “Hey you, what do you think?”. Part of the problem is folks hardly ever ask, or feel the need to after already having been told. But where do we draw from when this happens? Depends on the topic I guess. I’ve definitely caught myself just parroting something I heard on a podcast, or read in a tweet. The tell is I’ll start off my reply with “I read this thing…” or “I saw this thing…”. This all too common pattern resembles a forwarding of content engagement more than a human conversation. We all do it.

Access to knowledge and information has never been so commoditized, yet It’s clear now that reading a thousand tweets, watching a couple YouTube docs, or harvesting a hundred TikToks is not an ample substitute for organizing your thoughts on a topic. This leads to a dull shallowness that permeates everything, where increasing the volume of inputs further minifies the output.

It’s all squared away in your head, until it has to come out and make sense to somebody else. How do you get it there? There may be other ways, but I’ve found writing to be the shortest path. And what if it’s not there? You can just say “I don’t know.”.