Why I'm Writing More in 2025

One of my many goals for 2025 is to write more. Historically, I have always been a big consumer of media. Some might even say I’m extremely online. However, I have mostly always been a consumer of media, whether that’s as a lurker on Reddit, Twitter/X, YouTube, or beyond. And according to the 1% rule of Internet culture, “90% of the participants of a community only consume content, 9% of the participants change or update content, and 1% of the participants add content.” So it’s pretty normal for the vast majority of people to only consume content.

The reasons why I want to write more are manifold. Firstly, I think it’s a good way to force myself to organize my thinking. I always have a ton of unstructured thoughts floating around my mind at any given moment in time about all sorts of unrelated topics. Without writing things down, these varied thoughts occupy a lot of mindspace, which also means costly context switching between them. By writing things down, I’m forced to bring structure to my thoughts and articulate what exactly is on my mind. If my thoughts weren’t fully formulated yet on a matter, it forces me to figure out what exactly I mean to say. The hope is that after my thoughts are written down, the vacated mindspace can be cleared for new thoughts and ideas.

I also think of writing thoughts down as similar to the concept of using pointers in computer programming. For example, last year in 2024 many people asked me variations of the same question, “how can I get better at running?” Instead of repeating similar responses to many different people, I thought it would be more productive to summarize my thoughts in a single comprehensive post, which led to my first blog post a few weeks back. This way, there’s a single point of reference for people who are interested in my answer to this question, and it can also serve as a living document that can be iterated upon and shared.

In a modern world where short-form videos and tweets dominate people’s attention more than ever, I think there’s tons of value in long-form online content as a medium for the exchange of thoughts and ideas. Despite information being easier to access now than it’s ever been in history, the Internet is dealing with a proliferation of doomscrolling, brainrot, and now AI slop. As a result, the synthesization of actually useful ideas is as valuable as it’s ever been. I’m also reminded of this seven-year old tweet about a mental representation for Twitter, which is that it’s like “tapping a tuning fork and seeing who resonates.” I think of writing in a similar way. Many people may not care about or resonate with any single particular piece of online writing, but for those who do, it can provoke a novel line of thought or lead to an interesting conversation down the line.

In terms of my personal interests, back in school, despite taking creative writing classes, AP English, etc., I was never a big fan of academic writing. However, I view personal writing as a different type of exercise, which I enjoy more. In college, for example, I enjoyed journaling in the form of stream of consciousness writing. When it comes to online vs offline writing, I also considered whether I want to write more offline (i.e. pen + paper), which has the benefit of forcing you to be even more efficient with your words. However, some downsides are that it’s slower to write, harder to edit, harder to search, and harder to share, so I decided to go with the online approach. (Fun fact: before I was into chess and running, I was into speedtyping, peaking at around avg 140 wpm / max 192 wpm, so I still have some of that in me…)

Lastly, I’ve motivated to write and work on my website because of friends I know whose websites I’m inspired by (e.g. Natecation, iafisher, Jyo) as well as public writing I’ve read online (e.g. Tim Urban, Paul Graham, Andrej Karpathy). Even though I first set this personal website up all the way back in college, I haven’t touched it much since graduating. My reason for reviving it is that I think personal websites are a cool way to have your own “corner of the Internet”. We’re lucky to live in a time when basically anyone with access to a phone or computer can have their own platform, for better or for worse. Anyways, I have many more ideas for what I want to write about, so I hope I can make this a regular exercise. As always, I’m open to feedback, so let me know if you’ve read this far and this post inspires you to write or if you have your own thoughts on why writing is important. Until next time!