ss Why do I write? The question itself searches for the driving force behind an ongoing act. And while doing so, it reveals nothing about how long this act has been going on. I think this question, like many others, is “outcome-driven.” The lived experiences, the lessons, the textures along the road to that outcome, none of them seem to matter much. Perhaps the reader of this post is one of those “outcome-driven” individuals too. Maybe you’re reading to validate your own conclusions, or to extract some pragmatic benefit. Maybe you’ve landed here to learn something, understand it, and draw a quick takeaway. Let me be upfront: this is not that kind of place, that is not its purpose, and that is not why I keep writing. That’s not to say I don’t catch myself chasing pragmatic impulses throughout the day. Like everyone else, I find myself spinning in that loop more with each passing year. By the way, spinning in loops is actually a hobby of mine. Several days a week, I run the same route or circle the same track. Often for hours. Don’t I get bored? Honestly, just as we don’t notice the pragmatic loop we’re all trapped in, I don’t notice either. Sometimes the thought crosses my mind and I wonder why I’m not bored. Then a handful of possible reasons surface. I pick one or two, hand myself an easy answer, and move on. The truth is, my mood at any given moment has a lot to say about which answer I’ll accept as true.
The Courtroom in My Head
Writing, amid all this inner turmoil, gives me the gravity of a courtroom. The hearing itself, I mean, it makes no promises that the chaos won’t resume once the gavel drops. But at the very least, the voices in my head, the disagreements, the opposing sides, each get equal time to speak. They pour themselves out. And the emotions that spike my blood sugar and send my pulse racing find not just a physical response but a mental and tangible one. That’s really all there is to it. Words, languages, books, poems, everything springs from this.
Why do we need words in the first place? Why did people who weren’t great with language paint on cave walls? Why do people who share the same land speak the same tongue? A little research can answer all of these. What I want to express here is something different: the existence of feelings we can’t put into words doesn’t mean we no longer need words. Writing, in my view, is an act that extends our contact time with words. It’s the opposite of what people do when they watch online content at 2x speed. I tend to speak fast, so writing is a more zen act for me than talking. Even though my handwriting leaves much to be desired — and slightly tarnishes the whole endeavor — I believe writing synthesizes my thoughts. It forces my brain to evaluate all the possibilities without defaulting to its favorite shortcuts, and even to forge entirely new shortcuts of my own choosing. Maybe that’s why professionals in psychology so often turn to writing.
One Notebook Per Class
There’s another reason I consciously chose to write. It took me a long time to recognize how much this practice benefited my life and career.
During university, I was already working full-time, so exam periods were actually a vacation for me. Normally, I had to attend mandatory classes, complete assigned projects, and fulfill my responsibilities at work. Throw in the social life that comes with university, and it was all quite demanding. To keep that same intense tempo from spilling into exam week, I decided to prepare in advance — just one hour a day, a few days a week. While doing this, I bought a separate small notebook for each class and transferred my notes, questions, and answers into them. I was usually too tired and scattered during lectures to take proper notes, but when I got home and buried my head in the notebook, I’d recover my focus and capture that week’s material. My thinking was simple: I’m learning and noting everything now, so during exam week I’ll just skim through these and actually rest.
But when exam week arrived, the plan didn’t play out the way I expected. The most obvious reason was my handwriting, so bad that even I struggled to read it. I’d genuinely find myself questioning why I’d invested all that effort. Still, I’m the kind of person who keeps showing up for the same process, so I’d work through the practice problems, wrap up studying in an hour or two, and play the video games I’d been waiting for. After each exam, I’d usually feel it went well and the grades confirmed it. Frankly, this surprised me. The reason it surprised me was that I graduated with honors despite never once pulling an all-nighter throughout my entire university life. If there was one thing I was certain of, it was that I had no extra biological advantage in the intelligence department. I consider myself a person of perfectly normal, ordinary intellect. Even though I didn’t understand why at the time, I’d witnessed firsthand that this method worked, so I kept at it — and that’s how I finished university.
What I Understood Years Later
The real learning didn’t happen when I re-read my notebooks. It happened while I was writing them.
The Assignment With No API Documentation
After graduation, once I shifted my full focus to work, I stopped writing as much. As a computer engineer, I typed my notes into apps and stored them in the cloud, never to be read again, just like those class notebooks I never reopened. When I lifted my head from engineering problems and got promoted to a team-building role, no API documentation or training portal could help me. A thousand things were spinning in my head, but the loudest voices were anxiety and fear. And without even realizing it, I had already gravitated toward my old method. I was buying books, reading them, and building my own ideas on top.
When my thoughts met the page, right at the moment the ink traveled through that capillary tube and left its trace on paper — with that same fluidity, my mind was forming continents.
That paper spelled out exactly what kind of team I wanted to build, and I was planning my actions. I’m no longer that team’s manager, but I’m proud of what we accomplished together. I believe the approach we tried there has never been attempted anywhere else.
To this day, that team is praised and pointed to as a success story — and it wasn’t because I’m somehow special. I’m not saying this out of modesty; you can be sure of that. I’m saying it because it’s genuinely the case. I believe all of it came down to writing, it let my mind surf in the direction I wanted, at the speed it needed to go. When I don’t write, that surf is short-lived because I wipe out on the first wave. When I write, I ride those waves with joy and reach the heading I’ve set. That’s what I believe is behind all these outcomes.
A Gentle Rebellion
I still write. I write to learn at my own biological rhythm. I write to plant my emotions as seeds and harvest new seeds and fruit from them. And sometimes I write just to write, simply because it feels good. Like running. Like gliding. Like living. That’s why I write.
Writing is the most gentle rebellion, a quiet defiance against modern culture’s fetish for speed and productivity.