Writing Less

Ever since I started working, it has become harder to put thoughts on the page.

Writing less, in retrospect, is a warning signal. I keep track of my journal word counts assiduously; periods of muddling through—often indicative of looming crises—regularly correlate with low word counts. Goodhart’s law is at play, but whenever I write less, it usually means either I am not thinking hard enough about the muddle I’m in, or I am not paranoid enough and assume the good times will roll on forever.

Journaling is a bit like talking to yourself. When you find yourself unwilling to talk to your past and future selves, doesn’t that seem a little irresponsible? A little worrying?

Now, with the metric ever-present in my mind, I often force myself to journal about trivialities—home, office, or home office upgrades; the next Mac mini. I’m saying less with more words, but perhaps that is still better than not writing at all.

Etymology / Comedy

For a long time, I have been drawn to etymology. In an era of verbose, sloppy writing, etymology lets you say more with less.

Since many English words have Latin roots, I naturally developed an outsized interest in Latin compared to the other languages I have half-heartedly dabbled in. For a few weeks, I read a few pages of a Latin textbook every day and did the exercises, which helped greatly. Unfortunately, as with most things, the habit didn’t stick. Still, I could see myself giving it another go.

Etymology and comedy, in a way, both try to draw something sharper from the mundane, the everyday, and the cliché.

These skills are arguably even more valuable in conversation than in solitary writing. As we age, our paths diverge and our common ground shrinks. We also spend less time together socially. Consequently, it becomes vital to make the most of whatever shared context exists in the room, in the moment—the decor around you even if it’s the nth time you’ve been to the place, the chatter around you even if it’s no more inspired than your own.

Yet spontaneous conversation all too often defaults to autopilot. It is easy to monologue about obsessions you know no one else shares, or trade canned clichés and counterarguments. No one thinks. In computer science terms, we are just pinging each other’s caches, shrugging whenever there is a miss. But good dialogue isn’t a function of absolute knowledge, nor even of knowledge shared. Two experts can effortlessly settle for merely acknowledging each other’s expertise, whereas having no common ground at all is often what actually forces us to think.

One reason, of course, is that it is always dangerous to say what you mean and mean what you think—and who knows if you will still mean what you meant. Lu Xun once mocked this social tightrope: visitors who flatter a newborn’s parents by predicting wealth and longevity get praise, while the honest observer who notes the baby will eventually die gets beaten. What do you do if you want neither to lie nor be beaten? You stammer, “Haha! Look at the baby, haha!”

Still, laughter is probably preferable to dead silence. Bombed jokes are embarrassing, but people can often tell—and appreciate—how hard you tried.

Annie Hall

To quote Roger Ebert, “Annie Hall contains more intellectual wit and cultural references than any other movie ever to win the Oscar for best picture.” Watching Annie Hall felt like a vindicating payoff for all the random tidbits of cultural capital I had accumulated—details that had felt too trivial to share with my peers at the time of acquisition.

Deep down, you know conversations in real life cannot flow as smoothly or as precisely as those on screen, but you secretly wish they could.

To abandon conversation, however, seems Faustian. I still firmly believe in actively chasing the ideal. It might have eluded us then, but we should strive to get ever closer to it. What else can we do amid the mundane, the everyday, and the cliché?