Publish or perish?

To essay is to try. I always feel like I’m not writing enough. I’m not even trying. Even if I write a lot in my journals, I feel like I’m not writing anything serious or public. If it’s any good, why am I not putting it in the blog? If my blog posts are so great, why am I not publishing it in student newspapers? Despite getting some encouragement to do so, I’ve never mustered enough courage to send something to Cherwell.

I was recently reading Becca Rothfeld on why she quitted writing on substack. She felt that her “published writing is polished” yet her substack posts are “disheviled and uncertain”. The enemy of writing is not writing at all, yet I always feel guitly whenever I journal too much in seclusion. Should I at least talk through what I’ve been thinking to my friends? If it goes well, should I write a blog post about it? Am I just disheviled and uncertain?

Still, she concedes that she liked substack back when “no one really cared what I said”. I suppose as long as this is true I should keep writing here. Yet becoming a public figure is no longer voluntary. More and more will have their 15 minutes of fame, their worst dug out and promptly forgotten. Writing is truly one of the most dangerous thing one can do. One must never be under the illusion that what one writes publically will ever stay private.

Sometimes people say you shouldn’t think so far ahead, but why not? I suppose since extraodinary success requires long-term thinking and planning, survivorship bias implies extrordinary people overvalue long-term thinking to short-term thinking. It’s true less-privellaged people simply cannot afford long-term thinking.

If writing is thinking, and by its virtue of sticking forever it’s long-term thinking, one of the things I’ve loved most is digging up ancient text messages in whatsapp chats. Every conversation is filled with a trip idea that went nowhere or declarations unfulfilled, opinions since corrected.

I suppose unfufilled plans make people devastated–so much effort wasted? Yet the past is overdetermined, there are always too many reasons. The solution always seems to be making the next plan, to essay again.