Why write (publicly/at all)?

I journal nearly daily, which counts as writing. But much of my journaling has an implicit audience: my later self, and my therapist as a function of me using my journaled notes to jog my brain during my half-weekly therapy sessions.

When I was a child I wrote because I wanted to publish my fiction. When I was in high school and college I wrote to show off how smart I was. After I graduated, I have seldom written, but when I have, my audience has been my closest loved ones, and there is a clear selfish intentionality to my writing, which is to emit and promote some projection of my ego that I want to be absorbed by my loved ones so that they update their mental models of who I am in a way that best suits my needs (and insofar as my two values in life are: do all I can so my loved ones can live the lives they want, and do everything with integrity to myself; then, incidentally and purely as side-effect, what suits my needs may happen to suit the needs of my loved ones, too).

So, right this moment, why do I write?

1. There are things that I want to communicate to all my loved ones, and I have many loved ones. Here, I define “loved ones” as the humans who are important to me. Writing on a public channel decreases the activation energy to communicate updates to my loved ones. (The reason I want to communicate to my loved ones, i.e. ego and machinations thereof, is captured in the prior paragraph.)

2. There are things that I want to communicate to those who I don’t know nearly as well (yet) as I would like to, and I hope a one-sided fire-and-forget channel allows me to emit information to those people, which is valuable because { cost function lol, do the math yourself }.

3. There are or are not (don’t care) things that I want to communicate to my enemies, the class of whom is empty. The great thing about having no enemies is that I don’t even have to worry about wasting energy on enemies, because I ontologically have none. (While there are those who may view me as an enemy, that is both out of my control and irrelevant to whether I have enemies — as with friendships, it takes two to tango, and I’m a bad dancer).

4. There are things that I want to communicate to complete strangers. To the extent that my values in life moderately extend to the loved ones of my loved ones, and weakly extend to the entire world, my desire to project my ego to total strangers extends thus. (I have closed the loop and thus completed the tautology from the prior paragraph, you are welcome.)

Back to the topic of this essay as indicated by the title, why write?

Writing ≡ desire to communicate with some audience ≡ human relationship ≡ selfish drive ≡ ego.

We write as with all art (painting, fashion, sensuality) to express ourselves. I’ve had three or more close friends confide in me recently about their discomfort and self-dislike regarding their desire to project some brand into the world. These three or more friends happen to each identify (and generally be relegated whoops I meant designated by society) as women, and there’s a lot of gender discourse I don’t want to get into right now but just know that their self-dislike is absolutely valid and expected, as it’s the learned response we as men (yay, men!) have worked hard to train I meant engender in them. But this is not an essay about gender.

This essay is purely pointless and masturbatory, because I can, and because I am egotistic and selfish, and because I care about my brand in the ways delineated in points 1–4 of *So, right at this moment, why do I write?*.

The conclusion of this essay is: my dear three or more friends who are generally identified by society as women, yes you are totally branding whores — so am I, and so can all of us!