Dear diary, this post had four major revisions and I am still unhappy but I am forced to publish it just so I can write another one.

It all started as a happy and self-confident "5 reasons why you should write". I have used AI. It was awful. Dry. Impersonal. Preachy. But it made me ask the question:

"why do I write?"

I have changed the title to "5 reasons why I write". I have stopped using AI. I dug deep and tried to explain myself. I came up with some airy reasons like "self-improvement" and "though cohesion" and "leaving a trace". I have approached it like a school essay. Very verbose and articulated. It was as cringe as it was fake. There were two problems. First - I have realised that I don't actually know why I write. It is easy to make up reasons and to spew sensible word slop like a chatbot does. There is childlike bliss in blending words into sentences into text and seeing it appear on a web page. I made it. Let's stick it on the fridge. Every sentence I have added grew the bullshit pile until it has collapsed and buried my motivation to continue writing the post.

The second reason was simpler:

I don't usually use words like "cohesion" or "phenomena". My most used day-to-day adjectives are "poopy" and "ok". And yet when I start writing the text becomes plagued with exuberant literalisms and complex ever-spanning sentences that talk about everything and simply decline to finish. It would be bad enough if I knew what all the words meant but I suspect that some words I make up as I go. Is "literalism" even a word? Does it mean "a word or several"? I am afraid that I am hiding my shallowness behind the poopy prose. Like a junior developer who hides their lack of skill behind patterns and buzzwords and abbreviation. So cringe. So unnecessary.

So I started again. Wiped the slate and flushed the paragraphs. Let's see what I have learnt from the previous attempts:

I don't know why I write

I'm not very good at it

Writing is hard!

A good title and a great topic. It is honest and simple. It is relatable. It is a topic that can go places. Why is writing hard? Why do we write if it is hard? Does it ever become easy?

I could not finish the post.

For two months I have struggled and contemplated and amended. I went on side-quests. I wrote about product thinking, ranted about AI. I kept refactoring the text. I procrastinated and wrote less and less as weeks went by.

It was really hard.

Why was writing hard?

Writing is hard when you don't know what you are writing about.

I wrote about writing while having absolutely 0 experience in the topic. Shitposting and reading are not writing. Writing is writing. I hid behind AI and complex words. I segwayed to the topics I know more of.

The lesson is to write about what you know or do REAL RESEARCH if writing about what you do not know. Bullshitting makes poor writing.

Why do we write if it is hard?

I don't know yet.

Does it ever become easy?

Let's come back to this after another 20 posts.