Why I write

At UChicago I was fortunate to take an extrodinary class on social and political thought. I still think about one of the books that we covered to this day, The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt. It pops up in my mind when I reflect on what makes a meaningful and flourishing life. Below are few excerpts that I think capture why writing (categorized under speech) is so important.

This is true of no other activity in the vita activa. Men can very well live without laboring, they can force others to labor for them, and they can very well decide merely to use and enjoy the world of the things without themselves adding a single useful object to it... A life without speech and without action, on the other hand—and this is the only way of life that in earnest has renounced all appearance and all vanity in the biblical sense of the word—is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.

If action as beginning corresponds to the fact of birth, if it is the actualization of the human condition of natality, then speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness and is the actualization of the human condition of plularity, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.

In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of their voice.

Adapting and deviating from Arendt, I think we all have a strong generative drive—this could be a drive to generate a family, to generate services and things used in society, or to generate ideas (i.e science). Ideas are especially important since they can last throughout time, unlike a table I may build that will one day break or a family that will one day cease to exist. Ideas that are written down and recorded can proprogate for generations; more importantly, they can spark new creations. Ideas themselves represent the beginning of something—and this beginning can spark new ideas which lead to new beginnings—and so with written ideas we have a process of perpetual generation.

As humans, we necessarily will cease to exist, but the ideas that we record and the future ideas that we inspire will continue beyond our lifetimes.