Acts of Faith

Despite what a lot of people would have you believe, writing is not a miserable endeavor. I love writing, although for a long time I didn't treat writing as if I loved it. There were years during which I avoided it altogether, and in many moments when I've felt blocked I told myself that writing was stupid and hard, and that trying to "be a writer" was the worst, so I should give it up. I'm past all that now.

It turns out that writing is actually the best, because it exists in its own little sphere, somewhat distinct from other acts of creation. It can be pedestrian and otherworldly, grounding and transportive. It is both form and function. You can see it, hear it, and feel it. A picture used to be worth 1,000 words but in this era of relentless visual imagery and AI slop, what's a picture worth now?

What's hard, I've come to realize, is having faith, both in the value of what you want to express and in the way you're expressing it.

By nature, I am not a person of faith. I remember once, on a college campus, walking by a group of Asian students standing on the lawn all wearing identical t-shirts, banging tambourines and singing about Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior. One young woman in particular had an almost rapturous expression on her face. What I felt when I saw her was a deep curiosity: What was it like to believe so truly and deeply, to feel so wholly a part of something, that you would stand out there in public, not caring if other people thought you looked or sounded idiotic? What did it mean to love something so much that the joy of loving it was more powerful than the fear of how the world might respond?

Last year, my friend Brian — a writer who is so good at writing that it sometimes makes me mad (complementary), and a friend who sometimes has the patience of a saint — was on the receiving end of more than one freakout about my writing. He gave me some great advice, but there's one thing in particular that I keep coming back to. Almost exactly a year ago (September 25th, to be precise), I texted him to say I finally understood what he meant. I did, to a degree, but maybe not like I do now.

What he told me, as I was flopping around in various states of panic convinced I was never going to figure out what my book should even be about, was this: "Write the book you want to see in the world." God, do you know how much faith that requires?

This feels particularly relevant right now, at this weird, bad moment. It's relevant to tech, to the internet, to AI, to society, and to me as a human being. Even this newsletter is an act of faith. Every day we're hit in the face with an entirely new firehose of information. I can barely keep up with the regular news, let alone the tech news and the AI news, and even if I could keep up, I would remember that I want to keep up because as soon as I pick my phone up, the news app refreshes before I can click on the thing I want or I see something entirely unrelated and wholly distracting that sucks me until 25 minutes later I'm thinking, what was I trying to do?

And that's just as a consumer. As a "content creator" (god help me), there are all those other concerns. What if the thing I want to see in the world isn't the thing anyone else wants to see? Or what if they do want to see it but they can't, because their apps refreshed or they got distracted or some other thing is shinier and louder and has more velocity? Frankly, what if the thing I want to see isn't the most useful or important thing I could actually put out? Why am I writing this instead of talking about OpenAI and Hugging Face (really guys? Hugging Face?) or the way predictive models are actually valuable but not in a way that delivers the value Silicon Valley is always pursuing?

My entire career I was told that my approach, to writing or research or disseminating insights or influencing roadmaps, didn't scale. It was too focused or too deep. I wasn't flashy enough, didn't self-promote. The insights are universal, the approach is personal. That's the opposite of everything we experience now, in which the insights are personal, and the approach is universal. These days I think maybe my approach was a gift all along, I just have to trust it.

Maybe instead of feeling guilt that I'm not writing about the "right" things, or instead of feeling like I'm always missing out, I could just focus that energy elsewhere. Maybe there's something quietly — if not subversive or revolutionary, then at least worthwhile about having faith in my own ideas and values, in an era in which faith, ideas, and values are constantly being eroded. Maybe. We'll see.

Until next Wednesday.

Lx

PS: In a way, writing is like the couch-to-5K of creative expression. It's very accessible — all you need are a pair of sneakers and a path, or a pencil and a piece of paper — but for a lot of people it's also tedious and nowhere near as much immediate fun as dancing or painting or playing an instrument. The idea of a "runner's high" seems like a fantasy made up to keep you trudging along. As someone who is not physically built to jog, I get it. But writing, unlike running, is still the best.