No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.
Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.
That’s actually where I agree with the worrywarts of the written word: all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to entertain and manipulate complex thoughts, you have to read and write.
According to one theory, that’s why writing originated: to pin facts in place. At first, those facts were things like “Hirin owes Mushin four bushels of wheat,” but once you realize that knowledge can be hardened and preserved by encoding it in little squiggles, you unlock a whole new realm of logic and reasoning.
That’s why there’s no replacement for text, and there never will be. Thoughts that can survive being written into words are on average truer than thoughts that never leave the mind. You know how you can find a leak in a tire by squirting dish soap on it and then looking for where the bubbles form? Writing is like squirting dish soap on an idea: it makes the holes obvious.
— Adam Mastroianni
from a Substack Email
