To love a dying art, despite

I’ve long been fascinated by writers. I’m enraptured by the brutal candor and generosity that comes with the writer’s proclivity for excavating their soul in the hope of alleviating the loneliness of the reader’s. Half of the time, my mind is too cluttered to think deeply in the way that writers do. It scrolls through the superficial and only sometimes sinks into the existential. Call it the attention deficit that has gripped our generation, keeping us inattentive to anything beyond two clicks. It tugs and twists me inside, this paradigm we’ve so readily resigned ourselves to. 

In my two quarters here, I’ve told myself that I didn’t have the time to write. When I began college, I quickly became enveloped within the despair of realizing that writing was dissolving into a dying art. I was slapped in the face with this reality when I overheard a conversation at FloMo on an average Thursday afternoon. “If you get an email or text from me, it is not me. It’s probably written by ChatGPT,” a stranger chuckled to his group of friends. They laughed; I recoiled. But this moment was just as clarifying as it was disturbing.

Ever since then, I’ve been governed by an insatiable hunger. I began to read again. I began to write again. I realized that it is exactly because we are moving away from writing that I ought to return to it. And it has never been for my, or your own benefit — it is for the sake of our collective sanity, our shared humanity.

I now realize that one of the greatest gifts that writers have to offer is the story: the song of our same. Writers are committed to articulating the very emotions that we are terribly terrified of — the kind that takes great courage to string into words and expose to a world of searing scrutiny. When we are constantly one or two clicks away from tracking locations, scrolling through highlight reels or texting a friend, we’ve become socialized to always consume, always sedate. 

And I’d be the first to tell you I’m just the same. I used to fill the silence with anything that could, momentarily, help me escape my own mind: the clattering of a cafe that reminded me of the 9 to 5s of others, the clicking keys of a friend studying with me, Noah Kahan singing the same bridge of the same song on repeat, the brilliant noise that occupied every inch of my mind was a ritual in elusive safety. Busying myself with noise was safety. In many ways, this clutter kept me sane. But in all of this “prosocial” behavior, I was paradoxically surrendering to a life of recluse — I’d become distanced from myself. Two quarters later, I realized I hardly knew myself. 

I couldn’t explain this feeling, this consternation within my chest, until I read Joan Didion’s short essay, “Telling Stories.” Didion wrote, “my failing performance was a function of adolescent paralysis, of a yearning to be good and a fright that any sentence I committed to paper would expose me as not good enough.” I realized that the paralysis that I’d been experiencing transcended the realm of writing. It translated into every facet of my life. I’d become so scared of becoming that I decided not to become at all. It’s funny how even the most obscure emotions that rattle the human condition and make us feel like aberrations only make us more human. 

I could go on about the instances in which I’ve felt so entirely alone,and then came across a passage that cradled me with a simple, “I’ve been there, too.” This is something that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will never be able to do. 

This was not intended to be a treatise on why we ought not to use AI. Instead, it is a plea to not forget — to keep faith in the art of writing. Please remember the silent moments where you’ve read something that made you feel less alone — and more human. Please remember that this is the great gift that writing has to offer all of us. Let us all love this dying art, despite. 

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