The need to write
After a spiritual experience in college that led me to change majors from business to creative writing, I entered my first writing class. The professor asked about everyone’s favorite books and authors. Chuck Palahniuk, someone said. Slaughterhouse Five, another said. I had never heard of these. All I could think of was the book I read three times in third grade for my Accelerated Reader program: Where the Red Fern Grows. I lied then as I do now—I don’t think I ever actually read the whole thing.
Since then I’ve grown to love reading but have loved writing even more, from the layout and typesetting; punctuation matters from the “seedy underbelly” of grammarians, as David Foster Wallace called it; seeking the mot juste in the sentences. Christopher Hitchens, my favorite writer, said once that you’re a capital-W Writer if you feel not that you want to write but that you must write or else life would not be worth living. It’s a bit like that.
Writing is thinking. You explore half-baked ideas, not really knowing what you think about them until you see the words on the page. It’s like eating well or working out, a useful activity for the body, the mind, the soul, for the old as well as the young.
In the age of AI, it’s even more essential that we all become more writerly. Writing, as I said, helps us come to know things, which is useful when Claude can describe to us the heights of articulable human knowledge in a matter of seconds. Yet it also helps our teams stay aligned to our thinking, setting the cultural cues on which we build the business. It helps clients and the broader market know that, in fact, we do have something worth saying, an insightful and unique perspective worth pursuing.
AI can only do so much. Though I still believe our podcast-based workflow for generating content is needed for the foundations of an effective marketing operation, it can’t do it all. Among other things, a human’s tickling the keys is still required.
The reason for this need grounds itself in reality—an admittedly big claim. The Catholic Church published a fascinating paper on AI called Antiqua et nova, or Old and new, arguing for a high anthropology. It’s worth reading the whole paper if you’re so inclined. They start with an inquiry into epistemology, the nature of knowledge and intelligence itself, our relationship to truth.
Later on they discuss our relationship with others, discussing empathy and vulnerability from one body to another: “In this context, it is important to clarify that, despite the use of anthropomorphic language, no AI application can genuinely experience empathy. Emotions cannot be reduced to facial expressions or phrases generated in response to prompts; they reflect the way a person, as a whole, relates to the world and to his or her own life, with the body playing a central role. True empathy requires the ability to listen, recognize another’s irreducible uniqueness, welcome their otherness, and grasp the meaning behind even their silences. Unlike the realm of analytical judgment in which AI excels, true empathy belongs to the relational sphere. It involves intuiting and apprehending the lived experiences of another while maintaining the distinction between self and other. While AI can simulate empathetic responses, it cannot replicate the eminently personal and relational nature of authentic empathy.”
When we speak or write, we’re baring ourselves before another person, overcoming our fears, hoping for validation, longing to be accepted. AI can’t replicate that. It can’t know the silences, the pauses, the anticipation. But as you’re reading this now, I hope you can experience how different this feels knowing that a person—not a machine—sat here with the aim to connect to you. I took the time and labor to present myself in this way.
More practically, a great content creator on LinkedIn named Ted Merz, a certified financial analyst and former Bloomberg editor, said a few days ago that “the widespread use of generic AI has changed the game. It isn’t enough to just post any more, you need to post something that ONLY you could have done.” I’m confident, as many others are, that this activity will lead to the business results you hope for.
We need to write. I need to write. And I’ll challenge you to write more this year above and beyond your marketing needs. It is about that, no doubt, but it’s about so much more.