"Songs will be all they have to remember those of us who could write."
Something I am often re-learning is that I essentially write for my own benefit. Admittedly, I thought this might change when my book came out. "Look! I'm a published author! I wrote about big tech and social media and enshittification!" A small, egoistic part of me imagined I might be busy with speaking gigs and interviews for the next few months.
And, admittedly, that part of me felt slightly disappointed when the book release date came and went with little more than a slight engagement boost on the very services that my book tries to critique.
Hmmmmm...
But, as I have realized and re-realized and re-re-realized before, that is not the purpose of writing. For all intents and purposes, nobody reads anymore. I mean yes, some people read. I even see quite a few books on trains and busses these days, at least in Chicago.
But if you read more than one book per month, you are pretty weird. And if you read books for pleasure, you are super weird. If you are reading this blog post, yikes, sorry, it doesn't get much weirder...
Or, to reframe it, if you are reading this blog post, you are super special! A real-life snowflake! I have even seen some creators try to leverage this argument recently: "if your algorithm is showing you this video, you are part of a rare group of people who..."
Anyway.
Over the yeas I have gone back and forth as to how much audience actually matters. At times, I really want an audience. I spend months or even years on written work, particularly for "peer-reviewed" pieces. Please, somebody, take a look! I spent two years of my one wild and precious life trying to make this text useful and meaningful - will you please check it out? No worries if not!
(Also this is not the case for blog posts, sorry, I only spent a couple hours on this).
I also know that part of me still cares about audience because, in some cases, I have submitted article pitches or applied to speak at various events. When those proposals were rejected, I felt disappointed. I fear the inescapable conclusion of this disappointment: my egoistic desire for an audience remains.
And yes, the acceptances still feel good. But the drug wears off. I used to feel quite a high when Google Scholar emailed me to add in new articles. When they emailed me that I had crossed 1,000 citations, that was also a bit of a rush, although I have slowly learned that most work seems to cite other work without more than reading an abstract or looking at a couple important figures.
To get back to the point: we write for our own benefit. When I write something, I change my brain. I can almost feel the synapses firing and the new neural pathways expanding and connecting throughout my mind. I know that after I write this blog post, because I wrote it with my own mind, I have a much stronger grasp on the latent ideas that were trying to come to the surface.
For me, this is enough. Although my ego may still interfere at some points, in principle, I believe that the writing process itself is reward in and of itself. If zero or one or two people read this post and connect with it in any way, that is phenomenal. Miraculous, even, given the staggering cosmic odds otherwise.
AND (not but - and), if I am the only soul who ever comes in contact with these words, that too is phenomenal. I wrote them myself and they helped me makes sense of the world. And, more than likely, at some point in the coming days or weeks or month, I will talk to another soul who will speak a word or phrase that activates some of the same synapses and neural pathways that I have activated here. And we will forge new pathways as we make sense of the world together.
Perhaps that is the point of writing, regardless of who is in the audience. Perhaps the purpose is "just to create something beautiful and worthy of contemplation," something that helps us make sense of the universe and find meaning in it. And perhaps that was the point all along.