I used to be an avid writer, with a pen and paper no less. I was writing my sister’s college papers in high school, and then typing them up for her because she couldn’t type. I would hand write letters to my friends, to girls I liked, to family far away. I would journal my thoughts (a practice I started when I was 9) in books that no one ever read. In the Navy letter writing was one of the ways to pass the time at sea. When I was dating my wife, we lived 3000 miles apart. Even though we would try to talk daily, we still wrote letters to each other.
For many years I would engage in political and theological discussions via email or message board. I would research and think, rethink and overthink my positions and thoughts. Countless hours spent digging into subjects to better understand not just what I was thinking but what my opposition was thinking. So, by default reading, was my balance to my writing.
It was my therapy to just dump my thoughts out onto paper or type them into a word (type) document on my computer (because I’ve been a computer geek since the 1980’s). I didn’t care who read it or if anyone read it. Much like my wife tells me about her artwork, “I do it for me”.
But as life goes my work life shifted from one of physical activity and troubleshooting to one of constant mental drudgery, planning, organization, political wrestling, and deep analysis. By the time I’d get home each day, the thought of using my mind for anything else was just anathema. And so, I fell out of the habit of writing, of mentally dumping my mind into words.
In this time of my sabbatical from the expressive writing world, social media began to grow. Suddenly everyone under the sun was ‘writing’ except it wasn’t deep thoughts but soundbites, endless soundbites.
The last few years I’ve found I have more time to enter the world of writing that once was my fortress of solace. Yet whenever I try, I find myself uninspired, and hit a wall. I feel like I’m trying to sing a ballad in the middle of 10,000 other musicians just screaming into the same stadium. Some of them can actually sing, but most of them are just awful noise. And the reverberation of all of those voices and instruments at once is deafening.
This is what social media has done to the philosopher in me. It’s silenced me out of frustration and annoyance. I don’t know how to speak into this medium.
I also used to have grandiose ideas about the world and the potential impact I may or may not have. But I’ve learned that the true impact of my life is in the circle of the lives that God has placed in my path. I’m still entertained by politics, but I no longer see it as important enough for me to dig into and wrestled other with. I still am passionate about God, theology and religion, but again am drawn back to the circle of influence in my life, verses the masses out there who may or may not read the chaotic thoughts of my minds writing.
Nor do I spend nearly as much time wrestling with these things myself internally (which was a great inspiration for writing). My internal focus is greatly shifted to external. I’ve developed internal complacency, which I’ll admit is not a good idea.
Am I now just a guy who shares the witty anecdotes of others? Is my original thinking gone? Have I lost the knack for converting the chaos of my mind into coherent language?
The world is full of young thought hustlers on social media. Screaming unoriginal thoughts into the void. It’s also full of the absurd. We are inundated with it, and I’m left asking myself, why even try to argue against such ridiculous self-refuting ideas? And yet these ideas, no matter how absurd, linger and grow like fungus on a tree.
Today I read the following statement:
“Imagine going back to the ’90s and explaining to someone that the big marketing controversy of 2025 was a hot young blonde selling jeans.”
The very notion is beyond irrational and extreme, and yet that’s all I’ve been seeing for days now.
Yet this defines the other challenge someone like me faces when engaging this world today; The rate at which these maddening arguments come and go is lightspeed. There is no time to even wrap your head around the concepts before it’s gone, and the next rage bate concept is before you.
I’m accustomed to grabbing hold of ideas and ferreting out the very roots of their existence, which could take hours, days, months or even years. But instead, like in the I LOVE LUCY episode where Ricky puts Lucy on a very strict time schedule, the meal before you is gone before you even have a chance to get the fork into your mouth to taste it.
Sticking with the LUCY analogy, how does one write a review about a meal that he never even gets to taste?
In high school I spent the last 2 years as a TA helping my computer science teacher write a computer diary program. Back then computer programming was minutia to the extreme. You had to account for every detail, every connection, every flow path. It was an exercise is extreme attention to detail, to obtain the desired results. It was trial and error exponentially expressed over long periods of time.
I long for the days of minds that dig into the minutia, rather than pounce on the fleeting ‘rage’ of the moment. I want to teach our youth the glory of developing a deep understanding of something, of achieving expertise, of being so familiar with something that not only can you see the forest through the trees, but you also see the flowers, the vines, the critters and all the fauna sharply and positively. You know intimately and with certainty the knowledge you possess. You hashed through it relentlessly to the point that it becomes just another part of you. You are the Tom Bombadil of your field, one with the forest you dwell in.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be a prolific writer again. I no longer feel the need to write for myself, and there are few others I feel the need to write for. Or maybe I’m just out of practice and know the work it will take to rekindle the fire of my pen, and I’ve grown lazier in my middle age. It’s one thing to hold in your mind lots of information, it’s quite another to express it with detail. And that’s the crux. I’ve lost the minutia of many of my thought paths, and I don’t know that I’m inclined to put in the work to reclaim that.
And yet, even in this moment I am smiling at the therapeutic aspects of the release of the chaos of my mind. Maybe a simple return to my 9 year old self and a diary would be a good start.
